10/30/2026
Behind Barbed Wire at Rohwer
By K. Brad Barfield
Twelve miles northeast of McGehee, an agricultural landscape once contained one of the largest cities in Arkansas.
It was a city its residents had not chosen.
Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. The federal government forcibly removed people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast without individual criminal charges or trials. Families lost homes, farms, businesses, possessions, and the freedom to determine where they lived.
The Rohwer War Relocation Center opened on September 18, 1942. The government controlled 10,161 acres, while the developed camp occupied approximately 500 acres. Its barracks, administrative buildings, hospital, schools, warehouses, and mess halls formed a temporary city divided into numbered blocks. Barbed wire, guard towers, wooded boundaries, and military police controlled its perimeter. npgallery.nps.gov
Rohwer reached a peak population of 8,475. Approximately sixty-four percent of those incarcerated were American citizens, and more than 2,400 were school-age children. Most had been transported from California, leaving a mild coastal climate for an unfamiliar Delta environment of mud, mosquitoes, oppressive heat, and cold winters. nps.gov
Families lived in thinly constructed tarpaper barracks heated by wood or coal stoves. Residential buildings lacked plumbing and running water. Privacy was limited, with communal laundries, latrines, and mess halls serving each block.
Yet the people imprisoned at Rohwer created a functioning community. They organized schools, religious services, newspapers, gardens, athletic programs, art classes, and medical facilities. Artists Ruth Asawa and Henry Sugimoto developed work shaped by incarceration. George Takei, later known internationally as an actor and civil-rights advocate, experienced Rohwer as a child.
Some young men left the camp to serve in the United States Army, including the celebrated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. They fought for a country that continued to hold their families behind wire. nps.gov
Rohwer closed on November 30, 1945. The buildings were removed, sold, or repurposed, and most of the land returned to agriculture. Today, the cemetery, monuments constructed by those incarcerated, and remnants of the hospital smokestack preserve the camp’s physical memory.
In 2013, McGehee opened the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum inside its restored railroad depot. The location carries its own symbolism: the transportation system that built McGehee also helped deliver families into confinement.
Rohwer is not simply Japanese American history. It is Arkansas history—and a record of what fear can persuade a government to do.
Sources: National Park Service, “Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery”; Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Rohwer Relocation Center”; Arkansas State University Heritage Sites.
