Portal:National Register of Historic Places/Portal article/9

Manzanar is most widely known as the site of one of ten concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in California's Owens Valley between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, it is approximately 230 mi northeast of Los Angeles. Manzanar (which means "apple orchard" in Spanish) was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the former camp sites, and it is now the Manzanar National Historic Site.

Long before the first prisoners arrived in March 1942, Manzanar was home to Native Americans, who mostly lived in villages near several creeks in the area, and then to the ranchers and miners who established the town of Manzanar in 1910, but had abandoned the town by 1929 after the City of Los Angeles purchased the water rights to virtually the entire area. As different as these groups might seem, they are tied together by the common thread of forced relocation. Learn more...