Interesting/unusual facts
Jerome Relocation Center was the last center to open and the first to close. The early closure of Jerome was cited by the War Relocation Authority as a sign of success in placing Japanese Americans in jobs and homes outside of the West Coast Restricted Zone.

Jerome Relocation Center was the site of the only known shooting of evacuees by local civilians. A tenant farmer on horseback on his way home from deer hunting came across three Japanese Americans on a work detail in the woods. He fired one round of buckshot, wounding two internees. The farmer claimed that he thought the Japanese Americans were trying to escape and that the Caucasian engineer supervisor that was present was trying to aid the escape.

Jerome had a sawmill that produced goods for internal consumption. The sawmill produced more than 280,000 board feet of lumber and over 6,000 cords of firewood.

Jerome had the second highest percentage of person answering the loyalty questionnaire negatively, giving qualified answers to refusing to answer.

Jerome Relocation Center had the second lowest percentage of eligible male citizens inducted into the armed forces (0.9%). Tule Lake had the lowest.

After the relocation center was closed, it was converted into a prisoner of war camp for German soldiers.

Land ownership
The land formerly encompassed by Jerome Relocation Center is now privately owned farmland.

Special Designations
None

Preservation and Interpretive Efforts
Rosalie Gould, the former mayor of McGehee, Arkansas, has an extensive personal collection of artifacts from Jerome and Rohwer relocation centers and is attempting to establish a museum in McGehee to display the collection.

The University of Arkansas is currently cataloging Ms. Gould's collection.

Dr. Joanna Lewis, of the University of Arkansas History Department, is the Project Director of Life Interrupted: The Internment of Japanese Americans in WWII Arkansas. This is a $2.8 million Winthrop-Rockefeller Foundation project, working in partnership with the Japanese American National Museum. They will produce a traveling exhibit designed to tell stories specific to the Arkansas camps in the following areas: relocation and internment experience, artwork produced at the camps, internees' role in the military, and a one-hour documentary. They will also sponsor a symposium on civil liberties and host a camp reunion after the symposium. This is all to be completed by the fall 2004.

Public access to the site today
There is a 10-foot tall monument on the east side of U.S. Highway 165. Current private landowners have allowed visitors to see remaining features.

Local Resources
Rosalie Gould: 1610 North 3rd Street, McGehee, AR 71654, Tel: 870-222-5355.

Dr. Joanna Lewis: Department of History, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204-1099. Tel: 501-569-21-3216.

Selected Books
Bearden, Russell. "Life inside Arkansas' Japanese American Relocation Centers." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 48. 1989 169-96.

Friedlander, E.J. "Freedom of Press behind Barbed Wire: Paul Yokota and the Jerome Relocation Center Newspaper." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 44. 1985: 303-313.

Kim Kristine. Henry Sugimoto: Painting an American Experience. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000.

McVoy, Edgar C. "Social Process in the War Relocation Center." Social Forces 22. December 1943: 188-190.

Tsukamoto, Mary and Elizabeth Pinkerton. We the People: A Story of Internment in America. San Jose: Laguna Publishers, 1987.

Websites
www.uark.edu/depts/speccol/findingaids/jerome.html
University of Arkansas, Jerome Relocation Center Collection

www.lifeinterrupted.org
To be launched January 2003