The Rafu Shimpo - L.A. Japanese Daily News

Minidoka on List of Most Endangered Historic Places
Sunday, June 17, 2007

National Trust states camp suffers from local development threats.

Densho Digital Archive
Photo of the entrance to the Minidoka concentration camp taken in 1944.

National Trust for Historic Preservation
Honor Guard at the Minidoka Internment Camp annual pilgrimage in Hunt, Jerome County, Idaho.

WASHINGTON.—The Minidoka Internment National Monument in Hunt, Jerome County, Idaho, was named on Thursday to the 2007 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“Sixty-five years after they were stripped of their dignity and their freedom, former internees and their descendants may now be stripped of this evocative link to their place in American history, and we can’t stand by and let that happen,” said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Located on an isolated site in rural, south central Idaho, the Minidoka Relocation Center (also called the Hunt Camp) operated from August 1942 to October 1945. The complex held approximately 13,000 internees from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska and included 600 buildings, five miles of barbed wire fencing, and eight guard towers. Although the camp was disassembled in 1945, several key structures, numerous archaeological features, and important cultural landscape elements remain to tell the story.

The threats cited by the National Trust include a proposal to build a 13,000-head dairy cattle feedlot 1.5 miles upwind of the former camp site. While the first application for the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) was withdrawn, it has since been resubmitted.

“Industrial agriculture at this scale has enormous environmental consequences, yet when this animal production facility was initially proposed last year, county land use regulations did not permit the National Park Service, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the non-profit Friends of Minidoka, Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment (ICARE), the former internees and their families, or anyone else that lived more than one mile from the proposed CAFO to comment on the plan,” read a statement by the National Trust.

The organization also cited limited funds and staff to guide visitors on the site, which was designated a National Monument in 2001. Many significant resources lie outside of the current National Monument boundary. Nearby properties include camp supply warehouses, numerous barracks reused as farm buildings, an intact camp fire station, foundations and footprints of staff housing areas, and hundreds of archaeological features related to the camp.

The National Trust endorsed legislation, currently pending, that would increase the boundaries of the Minidoka National Monument as well as appropriating funds for the World War II Confinement Bill signed into law last year by President Bush. The bill provides funds to preserve sites where Japanese Americans were confined during the war. On the threat of the cattle feedlot, the National Trust urged immediate action.

“The impacts of CAFOs on air and water quality are both well documented and significant. ... Minidoka Internment National Monument and other historic sites and communities could be better protected through the enactment and enforcement of local, state and federal permitting processes that are required to consider the impact these industrial facilities have on communities and historic resources,” the National Trust stated.

America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places has identified 189 threatened one-of-a-kind historic treasures since 1988. Other sites on the list in 2007 include Brooklyn’s Industrial Waterfront, N.Y.; El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail, N.M.; H.H. Richardson House, Brookline, Mass. and Historic Route 66 Motels, from Illinois to California.

For more information, visit www.nationaltrust.org/11most/20th.