Amache National Historic Site

From 1942 to 1945 the government held more than seven thousand people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, behind wire on a square mile of sand hills west of Granada. Its official name was the Granada Relocation Center. Because the camp's mail kept getting mixed up with the town's, it came to be called Amache. When the war ended the barracks were sold off and hauled away, and what remained was concrete foundations, the water tower, a reservoir, the road grid, the cemetery and the trees the incarcerees had planted.

In 1990 John Hopper, a new social studies teacher at Granada's school, took his students out to the site, and that year founded the Amache Preservation Society. For more than three decades successive classes have mowed and repaired the cemetery, interviewed survivors, gathered donated belongings into a small museum in an old house in town, and written the roadside exhibits now on the site. The Denver Central Optimists Club, founded in 1983, organized yearly pilgrimages and paid for a stone memorial at the cemetery to the incarcerees and to the men who left the camp to fight for the United States. The University of Denver runs archaeological field schools here, with Granada students working alongside.

The site became a National Historic Landmark in 2006. The Amache National Historic Site Act was signed on March 18, 2022, and after the town of Granada donated the land, the site was established as a unit of the National Park System on February 15, 2024. A reconstructed barrack, a guard tower and a water tower stand on Block 12H; the museum in Granada still opens by appointment.