<Begin Segment 41>

TI: Okay, before we go there, I want to, let's stay at New Denver, because I do want to talk about that also. But New Denver, so it sounds like to me, what New Denver was, was in some cases designed to be a community.

HS: It was a community, yes.

TI: And what did the Japanese do to make it more like a community? I mean, were there things that they set up...

HS: Well, it became, see, one of the things they did, in New Denver, the actual houses were on a, sort of a, sort of a peninsula or a, or an outcrop of the shoreline of the lake. There was a farm there that sort of jutted out into the lake, and on that, on that jut of land, it had been cleared, and an Italian family that's name of Watson of all things, it was an Italian family of farmers. And they had, they had a market garden going in that area. They owned an orchard, that whole thing was an orchard, the whole jut of land. Well, they converted that whole, somehow, the B.C. Security Commission acquired that land, either rented it or they bought it, I have no idea. And, in fact, the Watson, the family of Italians lived right in the center of that, and continued to stay there all the time that the camp was there.

TI: So they were surrounded by the Japanese?

HS: Japanese, yes. So we were, they were always surrounded by us, and in fact, during that first winter, that was the winter of '42, they supplied a lot of the vegetables, the Japanese families that got in there and started cooking for themselves, and there was no, they had no way of getting fresh vegetables at that time. However, two hundred shiplap houses, two hundred plus. Because there were two hundred houses for people, plus they had to build, they built two bathhouses, or ofuro houses, they built a community hall -- and this was with shiplap -- and then they built something in the neighborhood of about twenty little, twenty little houses that became schoolrooms. Each house being, each shiplap shack becoming a schoolroom for a class of kids.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. So rather than having a large schoolhouse, they had these little, like, portables, kind of.

HS: That's right, it was portables. Well, the reason, of course, was that that's, the design was already set. They were pre-fabbed, you know, they were built in this, in this big rink that they had. Although it was a mess hall in the front end, the back end had been converted into a carpenter shop, and they put it into a carpenter shop, a tin shop, so that... a plumbing shop, and they, they really started working on that. The first thing they built were the houses.

TI: So who would be, who would be building these houses?

HS: Oh, all the, our fathers and young men.

TI: Okay, so they're back there building these shacks, and then move them to --

HS: Move them in, yes. And then I have a, one of the paintings I do shows you the building of the, of the shiplap houses. And it was, they, all the rafters and joists were built, and then they would just, they would just make a floor, and then, then they put up the, put up the frame, and then fill in the frame with shiplap and roof it with shingles. At the beginning, they didn't use shingles. All they did was put tarpaper on top of shiplap, and you had the tarpapers, tarpaper roof, and the sides were, with paper installation inside and you had the joists and the studs going up into the roof area. And this is all, all prefabricated. Everything was cut. What they really, they sat there and fit them together, and they would, they would have to build a floor, because each, each floor was individual, unfortunately, but they knew exactly how each, the sides of each one, because they're either, they had these three different sizes. And so they, they figured out which ones, how many of these they would build, and then allotted a house where some families were, families were given single houses, others had, were willing to take the double ones, and then we were willing to take a double one, but we had to get a bigger one because we, we had too many people.

TI: That's interesting. So you mentioned some of these shacks were used as schools. So did you have school that first winter in New Denver?

HS: That first winter, that first winter in (1942), they had a school going by that wintertime. Yeah, they had a school going, because they built, those were some of the first houses that were built. You know, it was, in the back of everybody's mind was the fact that our, the kids were being left uneducated, and that was not good. And one of the things that they, they approached the commission about -- 'cause they, the administration became... New Denver, the town itself of New Denver, village of New Denver, had a little administration building where the RCMP were, and they had administration for the whole valley. And I know that discussions probably went in between them and the Japanese people or whoever were... they made little associations of Japanese, some of the older men would become the, what you call spokespeople for the Japanese, and they would, they negotiate what could be done in the camp. There was never any barbed wire put up or anything. The camps were completely open.

<End Segment 41> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.