Minidoka National Historic Site

Near the entrance stands a board with an eagle on top and columns of names. The people held at Minidoka built the first one in 1943, after the government opened military service to the Japanese Americans it had imprisoned, and they added names as sons and brothers left the camp for the war. Nearly a thousand served from here. By the end of the war Minidoka had the longest casualty list of any of the ten camps.

The board did not survive the peace. After the camp closed in October 1945 its irrigated ground was cut into farms of about ninety acres and given to returning veterans by lottery, 43 in 1947 and 46 more in 1949. Each winner took two barracks with the land. The rest of the buildings were sold, given away or torn down for lumber, and somewhere in that dispersal the original Honor Roll was lost.

The Friends of Minidoka rebuilt it on its original site in 2011 with a National Park Service grant, and it is not finished. Families keep sending the names the 1943 board missed; an update in 2023 added about 140, bringing it to 845. It is one of the few things here that is still growing.

The rest of the site is mostly ground: a reconstructed guard tower, part of the rock garden prisoners built, restored near the entrance, an original barrack returned to the site, and a 1.6-mile trail through the old blocks. More than thirteen thousand people, most of them from Seattle, Portland and the rest of the Northwest, lived behind this wire between 1942 and 1945.