The Washington State Fair in Puyallup, Washington, sits on ground that held 7,390 Japanese Americans in 1942.
After Executive Order 9066, the Army turned the Puyallup fairgrounds into an assembly center. They called it Camp Harmony. It wasn’t.
Barracks went up on the parking lots and under the grandstands. Barbed wire. Towers.
Families from Seattle, Tacoma, and Alaska, most of them U.S. citizens, waited there from April to September, then trains took them to Minidoka, Tule Lake, and Heart Mountain.
The fair started again in 1946.
The Remembrance Gallery and the names are there now so nobody gets to pretend it was a carnival.