Heart Mountain Interpretive Center

The camp went up in about six months in 1942, built by some two thousand workers on a bench above the Shoshone River: roughly 650 buildings, among them more than 450 tar-paper barracks twenty feet by 120, each split into rooms for as many as six families, with army cots, a coal stove, a single hanging light and no running water. Each block shared its mess halls, latrines and laundry. There were schools, churches, a weekly paper called the Heart Mountain Sentinel, and a 150-bed hospital where some 550 babies were born. The people held here also worked the land around the camp, clearing and irrigating thousands of acres and digging a 5,000-foot stretch of the Heart Mountain canal for the federal Shoshone Project.

When the camp closed in 1945, the government opened that land to homesteading by veterans, and the barracks were sold for a dollar apiece to anyone who would haul them away. Many still stand as barns, sheds and houses across the county. On the site itself almost nothing stayed in place: the brick chimney of the hospital's boiler house on the hill, a few hospital and staff buildings, and a root cellar.

In 2015 the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation bought back one barrack and brought it home to stand beside the interpretive center, whose galleries tell the camp in the first-person words of the people imprisoned there.