Tulelake camp
| Camp Tule Lake | |
|---|---|
| Tule Lake, California | |
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| Coordinates | 41°58′08″N 121°34′05″W / 41.9688°N 121.5681°WCoordinates: 41°58′08″N 121°34′05″W / 41.9688°N 121.5681°W |
| Type | Prisoner-of-war camp and Japanese American incarceration |
| Site information | |
| Owner | Fish and Wildlife Service |
| Condition | Restoration |
| Site history | |
| Built | 1933-1935 |
| Built by | Civilian Conservation Corps |
| In use | March 1943 - 25 April 1946 |
The Tulelake camp was a federal work facility and internment camp located in Siskiyou County, five miles west of Tulelake, California. It was established by the United States government in 1935 during the Great Depression for vocational training and work relief for young men, in a program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps. The camp was established initially for CCC enrollees to work on the Klamath Reclamation Project.
During World War II, in 1942 the Tule Lake War Relocation Center was built next to the camp as one of ten concentration camps in the interior of the US for the incarceration of Japanese Americans who had been forcibly relocated from the West Coast, which was defined as an Exclusion Zone by the US military. Two-thirds of those incarcerated were United States citizens.
Renamed Camp Tulelake, this facility was adapted in the wartime years to shelter Japanese-American strikebreakers used against resisters at the main segregation camp, imprison Japanese-American dissidents, and house Italian and German prisoners of war (POWs) who were assigned to work as farm laborers in the region. After the war, on 25 April 1946, the camp was transferred from the Army to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which had managed it just prior to the establishment of the segregation camp. The four remaining buildings are being restored in a project to return the camp to its 1940s appearance.
The Tulelake camp was built in 1933 as a public work relief program, part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The camp was one of several constructed for the Civilian Conservation Corps. This program provided six months to two years employment and vocational training for unemployed, unmarried men, ages 17–23 from relief families. The 23-building camp included a duck hospital, an administrative headquarters office, the supervisors' residences, and a lookout cabin on the bluff behind the Refuge Visitor Center. Most of the buildings were constructed by the enrollees. Mexican-American stonemasons constructed more than 300 feet of rock wall around the Refuge Headquarters.
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