Jerome War Relocation Center
| Jerome War Relocation Center | |
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| Detainee camp | |
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Jerome War Relocation Center, 1942
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 Jerome War Relocation Center
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| Coordinates: 33°24′42″N 91°27′40″W / 33.41167°N 91.46111°WCoordinates: 33°24′42″N 91°27′40″W / 33.41167°N 91.46111°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | Arkansas |
| Opened | 1942 |
| Closed | 1944 |
| Founded by | War Relocation Authority |
| Population (February 1943) | |
| • Total | 8,497 |
The Jerome War Relocation Center was a Japanese American internment camp located in southeastern Arkansas near the town of Jerome. Open from October 6, 1942, until June 30, 1944, it was the last relocation camp to open and the first to close, and at one point it held as many as 8,497 inhabitants. After closing, it was converted into a holding camp for German prisoners of war. Today, there are few remains of the camp still visible, the most prominent being the smokestack from the hospital incinerator.
Jerome is located 30 miles (48.3 km) southwest of the Rohwer War Relocation Center, Due to the large number of Japanese Americans detained there, these two camps were briefly the fifth and sixth largest towns in Arkansas. Both camps were served by the same rail line.
A 10-foot (3.0 m) high granite monument marks the camp location and history. The marker is located on US Highway 165, at County Road 210, approximately 8 miles south of Dermott, Arkansas.
On December 21, 2006, President George W. Bush signed H.R. 1492 into law guaranteeing $38,000,000 in federal money to restore the Jerome relocation center along with nine other former Japanese internment camps.
The 2004 PBS documentary film Time of Fear outlines this history of the camp and the similar camp in nearby Rohwer, Arkansas.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized military leaders to declare the West Coast a military zone from which persons who posed a threat to security could be excluded. This allowed for the "evacuation" of 120,000 Japanese Americans, who were rounded up and placed into concentration camps isolated in the country's interior. The Jerome War Relocation Camp was located in Southeast Arkansas in Chicot and Drew Counties. It was one of two relocation centers in Arkansas, the other being at Rohwer, 27 miles (43 km) north of Jerome. The Jerome site was situated on 10,054 acres (4,069 ha) of tax-delinquent land in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River's flood plain that had been purchased in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration. Despite initial resistance from then-Governor Homer Adkins — who only agreed to allow the camp after exacting a guarantee that the Japanese American inmates would be watched by armed white guards and removed from the state at the end of the war — the War Relocation Authority acquired the land in 1942. The A. J. Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas, working under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers, built the Jerome camp at a cost of $4,703,347.
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