Tule Lake Segregation Center
An incarceration site in Newell, California, opened in 1942, Tule Lake Segregation Center is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Preserved portions of the largest WRA incarceration camp. The archive files it under dark history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Access is restricted, and the file says so plainly.
NPS describes ranger tours; confirm arrangements. Nearby Peninsula/Castle Rock is closed to public access.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Tule Lake Segregation Center haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Tule Lake Segregation Center is the camp inside the camp — the maximum-security facility the government created in 1943 to hold the 'disloyal,' defined by a loyalty questionnaire whose two questions asked the impossible. Question 27 asked draft-age men if they'd serve in combat; Question 28 asked everyone to swear unqualified allegiance and 'foreswear' the Japanese emperor — for the Issei, who were barred from citizenship, a demand to become nationless. At Tule Lake, forty-two percent refused or answered no.
The segregation made it the hardest camp in the system. Eighteen thousand people crowded in; 'loyal' Tuleans were supposed to leave and four thousand refused to move again; the November 1943 protests brought martial law, tanks at the gate, and a stockade that held men for months without charges. Tule Lake was the last camp to close, in March 1946, and it produced the renunciants — the five thousand Nisei who, under the pressure of the camp, gave up their American citizenship, a decision most fought for decades to undo.
The file keeps the Segregation Center: the questionnaire, the no-no boys, the stockade, and the camp where the government's own process manufactured the disloyalty it claimed to contain.
Tule Lake is the archive's segregation file — the loyalty test, the stockade, and the citizenship the camp pressured people to renounce.
Why this file matters
Tule Lake Segregation Center is the archive's segregation file — the questionnaire, the martial law, and the renunciants the camp produced.
A camp built for 'disloyals' keeps its stockade — the file's suggestion being that Tule Lake's hold is the mechanism: the form that made the answer impossible, and the camp that punished the answer it forced.
The Tule Lake War Relocation Center, also known as the Tule Lake Segregation Center, was an American concentration camp located in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California and constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarcerate Japanese Americans, forcibly removing them from their homes on the West Coast of the United States. They totaled nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. Among the inmates, the roughly phonetic Japanese notation "Tsurureiko (鶴嶺湖)" was sometimes used in referring to the camp.
Tule Lake War Relocation CenterThe long record
- 1942Opened
Opened to use
- 1942Incarceration
Tule Lake opens
- 1946Institution Closure
Tule Lake closes
- 1946Closed
Ceased operation
Documented history
Operated May 27, 1942–March 20, 1946. The original jail, stockade and maintenance areas remain within the historic site. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. 'Tule Lake' documents the entry. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.
Verified historyNational Park Service
Sources on file
- 01Tule LakeNational Park Service · government · A1
Field notes & open questions
Segregation center at Newell distinguished from separate Camp Tulelake. No conflation with Tule Lake lake or wildlife refuge.