Densho Digital Archive - Jane Wehrey Interview (denshovh-wjane-01-0005)

<Begin Segment 5>

JW: My ties at Manzanar go back to 1919 when my mother's family came from Colorado and settled in the Owens Valley at what was called the Manzanar Irrigated Farms. It was an agricultural community started by George Chafey who had don a lot of agricultural development here in Southern California. My grandfather ran the store there at the little town and the little, the town's population was only a little over 200. And there was about two or three thousand acres of apple and pear and peach orchards and general farming and ranching going on there. Between 1910 and about 1930, the town began to die out in the '20s when the City of Los Angeles began to purchase properties, as they did all over the valley, for their water rights. And a lot of the people weren't doing too well at Manzanar anyway, so they were, they were, some of them were happy to sell out, others did not want to. So my grandfather sold his store in 1925 and the family moved to Independence. My mother had attended grammar school in Manzanar, at the two-room schoolhouse, and then she started going to high school while the family still lived there and the students were bused to Independence to the high school from Manzanar. And then my mother just finished high school and went to college and then when she finished college she moved back to Independence and began to teach school.

JA: What would valley residents have seen driving down that highway?

[Interruption]

JW: When the camp first started, the people in the Owens Valley, as they would drive by, would see a scene of dust and chaos, they said. As time went on, the camp changed in appearance and as they would drive by, they would see the fields cultivated, the people in the camp were growing crops and there were lots of trees, they could see that they had planted these flowers, and there was a real changed appearance in terms of how it was green. And this was something that impressed the people in the Owens Valley because Manzanar had once been green and then had been, had gone back to the desert. Not too many of the people that I have talked to allude to the guard towers, but they do remember them being there. They also say that after a while, the guard towers were not manned. They also try to tell about -- they tell about how the internees would get out the camp and go up in the mountains and fish. I think there's a tendency on the part of the people in the Owens Valley who remember this to minimize the aspects of confinement about the camp. They wanted to not see the camp as it might have been actually, because it was sort of a blotch on their own history and their place. So most of the, most of the people that I've talked to and the people in the Owens Valley see this scene as one that changed quite dramatically from this dusty chaotic time into this more ordered, green, lush environment.

JA: A lot of people today, not just in the valley would use that to support the claim that they were better off there.

JW: That's right, that's right, exactly. There is that sense among people at that time who said that they were there for their own protection and that they were better off there, and that even during the war that they didn't have rationing, they had better food, they had... they were protected, they were being taken care of by the government. So there was a lot of mixed reaction to this as far as the people on the outside, the people in the valley looking at this, who were looking from the outside. Most of them had not been in the camp. So, they really didn't understand what was going on. They could only see the scene that had, that had changed over this period of time.