Rohwer, Arkansas

May 11, 2010

Rohwer Relocation Center, Arkansas where I was born on January 1, 1944

Click on any photo to see it full sized. Then use your browser Back button to return to this Blog.

I had just visited the site of the Jerome Relocation center which is only 28 miles south of Rohwer. But Rohwer is where I was born and at that site the cemetery still remains.

From Wikipedia:

In its summary on the Rohwer Relocation Center Cemetery, the National Park Service indicates that the cemetery's condition is threatened due to deterioration of the grave markers and monuments, but that ownership of the site is unclear.^[1] Deterioration is visible in photographs of the site. Deterioration is discussed in a report from the National Park Service to the President.^[3]

A tank-shaped memorial, made of reinforced concrete, guards the cemetery, commemorating Japanese Americans who fought for the United States at Anzio and elsewhere in Italy and France during World War II. Thirty-one who came from Rohwer died in action, and their names are inscribed on the memorial, as well as a later memorial raised nearby.^[3]

The cemetery is located 0.5 miles (0.8 km) west of State Route 1, approximately 12 miles (19.3 km) northeast of McGehee, Arkansas. Signs identify the graded road which goes from the highway to the cemetery, where there is room to park automobiles.

Here is the sign along Arkansas Hwy 1. But there is nothing at all there save a house or two along side the road.

Off on a side road there is the Rohwer Post Office in a pre fab building. Rohwer's zip code of 71666 is also shared with parts of McGehee.

Here I am getting ready to go inside the Post Office.

The Post Mistress is sorting out the mail in her office.

Here is the 71 year old Post Mistress who has held this job for about 35 years and lives just up the road a few miles.

These are some photos of the inside of the Post Office



Next door to the Post Office is Donley's General Store which closed its doors over 20 years ago.

Back to Arkansas Hwy 1 and about a quarter mile north you turn west onto this gravel road that leads to what remains of the Rohwer Relocation Center, its cemetery.
The clump of trees at the end of the road is the cemetery

Here are the head stones placed here from 1942 to late 1944.

Besides the cemetery there are two old monuments that were erected before the end of WW II and two fairly recent additional monuments.
































I telephone mom to tell her that I am at Rohwer. Since the cemetery was at the south east corner of the Camp the land behind me was where the rest of the Camp was located.

Map of Rohwer Relocation Center


Article in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History in Culture


Click anywhere below to open the National Park Service web site, and read the On Line Book in a new window:

Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites by J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord, and R. Lord

Another interesting web site with a lot of information is at:

Japanese-American Internment Camps

~end .

Jerome, Arkansas

May 11, 2010

Jerome Relocation Center Arkansas

Click on any photo to see it full sized

Jerome, AR as of the 2000 Census had a population of 46. The only business in town is the Alice-Sydney Dryer and Seed Company.

We stopped at this business to get some local knowledge of the exact location of the remains of the Jerome Relocation Center. It turns out that the highway that we are driving on goes right through the Jerome Camp location. The rest of the Camp is owned and now farmed by John Ellington, who is now in his early 70's. He normally hangs out at the Alice-Sydney Company in the mornings to have his coffee. But today he has a job surveying on one of the levees and will not be in town until the evening.
It is lunch time and the staff are still on their lunch break



One of the office staff

This lady was quite helpful in helping us with information about Jerome and Mr Ellington

From Arkansas.com Attractions:

It turns out that a granite marker commemorates the site of a World War II relocation center for Japanese-Americans; laundry smokehouse from camp remains.

The monument is right along side the highway on Mr Ellington's property. It is about a half a mile north of the Alice-Sydney Company.


The monument is easily visible from the highway

The rest of the Camp is where the structures are now standing and perhaps a bit beyond that

Mr Ellington maintains this bit of lawn and low fence around the monument


The nearest town is McGehee, AR which is about 12 miles north of Jerome.
From the City of McGehee's website:

The City of McGehee was incorporated March 5, 1906 and has a population of 4570. It is located at the southeast corner of the state.

This is the current High School and I believe those students in both the Jerome and Rohwer Camps who graduated from High School during those days have a McGehee High School diploma. In fact, Rohwer shares a zip code with McGehee, 71666. Both Camps were about 12 miles from McGehee.
The following is copied and pasted from:
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2399#

Jerome Relocation Center

The Japanese American relocation site at Jerome (in Drew County and partially in Chicot County) is a National Historic Landmark. This Japanese American incarceration camp, along with a similar one built in Desha County, eventually housed some 16,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast during World War II. The Japanese-American population, of which sixty-four percent were American citizens, had been forcibly removed from the West Coast under the doctrine of “military necessity” and incarcerated in ten relocation camps dispersed throughout the inner mountain states and Arkansas. This was the largest influx and incarceration of any racial or ethnic group in Arkansas’s history. The Jerome Relocation Center was in operation for 634 days—the fewest number of days of any of the relocation camps.

The Jerome site consisted of tax-delinquent lands situated in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River’s flood plain and was purchased by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration chief, Eli B. Whitaker. The lands, in dire need of clearing, development, and drainage, were in Drew and Chicot counties. The camp was built eight miles south of the small farming town of Dermott (Chicot County) and was connected by rail to the Rohwer Relocation Camp (Desha County) by the Missouri Pacific Railway system. The entire Jerome site encompassed 10,054 acres situated between the Big and Crooked bayous. The A. J. Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas, built the Jerome camp at a cost of $4,703,347. In operation from October 6, 1942, to June 30, 1944, Jerome held 8,497 Japanese Americans at its peak.

The compound eventually became nearly 500 acres of tarpapered, A-framed buildings arranged into specifically numbered blocks. Each block was designed to accommodate around 300 people in fourteen residential barracks with each barrack (20'x120') divided into four to six apartments. (This was the traditional military style for barracks, though the internees rebuilt or remodeled the insides.) Each block also included a recreational building, a mess hall, a laundry building, and a building for a communal latrine. All the residential buildings were without plumbing or running water and were heated during the winter months by wood stoves. The camp also had an administrative section that was segregated from the rest of the camp to handle camp operations, a military police section, a hospital section, a warehouse and factory section, a segregated residential section of barracks for white WRA personnel only, barracks for schools, and auxiliary buildings for such things as canteens, motion pictures, gymnasiums, auditoriums, motor pools, and fire stations. The camp itself was partially surrounded by barbed wire or heavily wooded areas with guard towers situated at strategic areas and guarded by a small contingent of military soldiers.

The Jerome Center was officially declared open (although it was not completed) in September 1942, and its population reached 7,932 in January 1943. The project director of Jerome was Paul A. Taylor until the last few months of the camp’s operation. Eli B. Whitaker, former regional director of both camps in Arkansas, assumed duties as project director when Taylor took a higher position in the WRA.

The constant movement of camp populations makes completely accurate statistics difficult; however, as of January 1943, with a population of 7,932 that was engaged predominantly in agricultural work before the war, thirty-three percent of the men and women in the Jerome Camp were aliens—fourteen percent over the age of sixty. Sixty-six percent were American citizens—thirty-nine percent under the age of nineteen. There were 2,483 school age children in the camp—a full thirty-one percent of the total population.

The incarcerated Japanese American youth at the Jerome camp had the most negative reaction to the Army’s forced loyalty and military draft program initiated in February 1943. Several hundred young Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans, born in the U.S.) peacefully marched to the camp director’s building and petitioned against the program.

The first of the ten relocation camps to close, Jerome was used as a German POW camp until the end of the war in Europe. Today the site is mostly used as farmland, although a monument marks the former camp. The remnants of the hospital smokestack can also be seen south of the monument.

Russell E. Bearden
White Hall, Arkansas

Last Updated 1/12/2010

~end
.