Raton Ranch

The relocation the panel describes was detention under guard. On the night of January 19, 1942, with a mob in Clovis threatening them, officials removed the town's entire Japanese American community, thirty-two people, the families of ten Santa Fe Railway men who had worked there twenty years or more, many as senior machinists. They were brought to this empty camp and held until mid-December; at least one family went on to the Topaz camp in Utah. None of the men got his railroad job back. Foundations and Japanese gardens remain in the campground.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Raton Ranch Baca Campground Shortly after Civilian Conservation Corp. camp DF-17-N was established in 1933 under the New Deal, it was renamed Camp Saturnino Baca for the founder of Lincoln County. Abandoned after one summer, it reopened in 1935 for five years as one of the first Unemployed Girls' Educational Camps in the nation. After Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941, the entire Japanese population of Clovis-railroad workers and their families-was relocated here during 1942, and the camp's name reverted to Raton Ranch. Today it is managed by Lincoln National Forest as Baca Campground.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lincoln Historic Site — 3.9 mi
  One street of adobe in the Bonito valley kept much as it was in the 1870s, where the Lincoln County War was fought over who would supply Fort Stanton and the Mescalero agency.
• Smokey Bear Historical Park — 8.1 mi
  The small park in Capitan where the living Smokey Bear is buried, a cub found clinging to a burned tree in the Capitan Mountains in 1950, six years after the cartoon was invented.

More markers nearby

• Lucy Lepper Shaw — steps away
• Eve Ball (1890-1984) — 2.6 mi
• Lincoln — 3.5 mi
• Lincoln — 4.5 mi