What happened here
What Topaz was.
In the spring of 1942, months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government ordered people of Japanese ancestry removed from the West Coast under Executive Order 9066. Families from the San Francisco Bay Area were first held at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a hastily converted racetrack south of the city, then put on trains east. Topaz opened on September 11, 1942, and operated until October 31, 1945.
It was one of ten War Relocation Authority camps across the interior West, and for a time it was one of the most populous places in Utah. More than 11,000 people passed through, with a peak of about 8,100 living behind barbed wire at once. About two-thirds were American citizens. None of the people confined at Topaz was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, sabotage or espionage. The Topaz Museum names it plainly, in its own words an episode that sullied the history of American democracy and its Constitution.
The camp filled a one square mile grid of 42 blocks on the open desert, most of them rows of tar paper barracks with a mess hall and shared latrines, a single room and a coal stove to a family. It took its name from nearby Topaz Mountain; it was nearly called the Abraham Relocation Center, after the little farm town beside it, until the post office got in the way. Decades later, in 1988, the Civil Liberties Act carried a formal national apology and redress to survivors. The longer story of this valley, its fossils, its Fremont and pioneer layers, sits on the sibling Delta deep history page; this one stays with the war years.
Topaz in brief
The desert today
The site, and what remains.
The camp stood about 16 miles northwest of Delta, out past the small farming community of Abraham, on a flat, wind scoured shelf at the lip of the Great Basin. After the war the barracks were sold off and hauled away, and the desert took back most of the rest. What is left is quiet and low to the ground: building foundations, the cindered lines of old roads and gravel walkways, pieces of the perimeter fence, and the concrete slabs where thousands of people once lived.
Two monuments stand on the site. One marks the camp for what it was; a second, placed in 2005, honors the Japanese Americans from Topaz who served in the United States military during the same war that imprisoned their families. In 2007 the National Park Service designated Topaz a National Historic Landmark. There is no visitor center out at the site and little signage, which is exactly why the museum in town matters, and why most people see the museum first.
This is protected ground and a place of memory. Everything on it, every nail, shard and foundation stone, is part of the historic record and is meant to stay where it lies. Walk it, photograph it, sit with it, and take nothing. The Topaz Museum can give you current directions and a map before you drive out.
Treat the drive out as a desert trip. The Topaz site is about 16 miles from Delta on roads that grow rough and unpaved near the end, with no services, no shade, no water and no cell coverage to count on. Fuel up, carry water, and check directions at the museum first. And remember the ground is protected, so leave every object exactly where you find it.
The camp site
The record, kept in town
The Topaz Museum in Delta.
The Topaz Museum sits on Delta's main street, at 55 West Main, and it is the reason the site can be understood at all. It grew out of a long effort to buy and protect the camp land and to gather what survived, and it opened its permanent home in downtown Delta. Inside are photographs, artifacts and the artwork made in the camp, including work from the art school that Bay Area artists ran behind the fence, along with a reconstructed barracks room that shows how a family actually lived.
It is open Monday through Saturday, 10 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, year round except for a short list of holidays, and admission is by donation. Plan to start here. An hour in the galleries gives the foundations out on the desert their weight, and the staff can point you to the site with current directions. The museum's own website, topazmuseum.org, is the authority for hours and any closures before you drive.
The Topaz Museum
Before you go
Visiting, and Delta as your base.
What to know before you go
Delta is the nearest town, and the practical base for a visit. It sits where US-6 and US-50 cross the Sevier River in Utah's west desert, roughly 130 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and it carries the services a day trip needs: fuel, food, a grocery store and a few motels along Main Street, within a few blocks of the museum. West of town the farm country thins into open desert fast, so Delta is the last easy stop before the site and the long drives beyond it.
If the history is what draws you here, the town holds more of it. Delta's museums and back roads connect to the Fremont, fossil and pioneer past of the whole valley, gathered on the deep history page. The rockhounding side, including the dig your own trilobites quarry west of town, is on the U-Dig and trilobite country page. And the practical side of Delta, its neighborhoods, schools and prices, lives on the everyday Delta guide and the Delta city guide.
