17 Facts About Manzanar

Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945.

Manzanar was first inhabited by Indigenous Americans nearly 10,000 years ago.

Manzanar founded the town of Manzanar in 1910, along the main line of the Southern Pacific.

Manzanar built an irrigation system over an area of 1,000 acres and planted about 20,000 fruit trees.

Manzanar remained uninhabited until the United States Army leased 6,200 acres from the City of Los Angeles for the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

Related searches

Manzanar was the first of the ten concentration camps to be established, and began accepting detainees in March 1942.

Manzanar held 10,046 adults and children at its peak, and a total of 11,070 were incarcerated there.

The weather at Manzanar caused suffering for the inmates, few of whom were accustomed to the extremes of the area's climate.

Camp site was situated on 6,200 acres at Manzanar, leased from the City of Los Angeles, with the developed portion covering approximately 540 acres.

Once the Manzanar Hospital was built, it included a kitchen, operating rooms, treatment wards, laboratories, and other facilities.

Barracks at Manzanar had no cooking areas, and all meals were served at block mess halls.

Food in Manzanar was heavily starchy and low quality, including Vienna sausages, canned string beans, hot dogs, and apple sauce.

Manzanar, which had been historically owned by the City of Los Angeles, was registered as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1976.

Letters were sent to the National Park Service included statements that Manzanar should be portrayed as a guest housing center, with others stating that calling the site a concentration camp is "treason", threatening dismissal campaigns against National Park Service employees and other related individuals, threatening to destroy buildings, and objecting to the use of the phrase "concentration camp" on signage at the site.

Manzanar site had 1,275,195 people visit from 2000 through December 2016.

The short film, A Song for Manzanar, depicted the true story of a detainee and her struggle to remain hopeful for her son and stay in contact with her family in Hiroshima.

The Asian American jazz fusion band Hiroshima has a song entitled "Manzanar", inspired by the incarceration, on its album The Bridge.