Japanese-American Internment Camp Site Reopens as Museum

Wyoming's Heart Mountain once housed 14,000 detainees

August 19, 2011

Most of the artifacts at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center were donated by former internees.

During World World II, as the United States battled Japan and the other Axis powers, 14,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated at a remote camp. Ex-internees, their descendants and local residents worked together to develop a place that would tell the stories of the forced relocation and teach its visitors lessons for the future.

Back in time

The road to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, is lined with golden fields of hay in late summer. The landscape is mostly empty until a tall smokestack appears on the horizon, growing into a vertical dark line above the fields. It’s all that remains of the hospital at Heart Mountain Internment Camp. Then Heart Mountain itself looms in the distance.

Replicas of barracks have been erected where the original camp stood. They house the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center. Walking into the newly opened museum is to travel back in time, surrounded by the faces and voices of those who were held here against their will.

Steve Leger, executive director of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center, stands in a replica of a lived-in barracks room.

Steve Leger, the center’s executive director, leads the way past an exhibit showing the internment orders that were posted in Western cities.