Camp Tulelake

Camp Tulelake was built to employ young men and ended by imprisoning them. The Civilian Conservation Corps raised the camp in 1935 — one of the New Deal's work camps, where enrollees earning thirty dollars a month built the duck hospital, the refuge headquarters, and the stone walls Mexican American masons laid around the Klamath refuge buildings.

The war changed what the camp was for. In March 1943, more than a hundred men from the Tule Lake relocation center were moved here — imprisoned in the old CCC barracks for refusing to answer the government's loyalty questionnaire. When a judge ruled they had broken no law, the WRA held them at the isolated camp anyway, fearing the example. Later that year, after a fatal farm accident at the Segregation Center and the strike that followed, 243 strikebreakers from other camps were housed at Tulelake for their own protection. From 1944 to 1946 the camp held German and Italian prisoners of war — the same barracks housing, in sequence, unemployed Americans, imprisoned American citizens, and captured enemy soldiers.

Four of the twenty-three buildings remain — a barracks, the mess hall, the garage, the paint shop — the only CCC camp in the region still standing, now part of Tule Lake National Monument. The site is not open to the public; the buildings stand on Hill Road above the refuge the CCC men built.

Camp Tulelake is the archive's triple-use file — the camp that held workers, then dissenters, then prisoners of war, in buildings that served all three purposes in a single decade on the same ground.