Welcome to Part 5 of our 6-part series exploring the hidden histories, rugged landscapes, and unvarnished stories of the American highway with Parker Dam Adventures. In this article I share the history behind the Poston War Relocation Center. Follow along as we uncover the forgotten corners of our travels on The Camper’s Guide to RV Living.
In this article…
One of the greatest joys of the RV lifestyle is the freedom to change plans on a whim. When you travel by house-on-wheels, a simple detour can instantly turn a mundane errand into an unforgettable encounter with history.
That is what happened to “The Man” and me one chilly morning back in 2019. We were driving down Mohave Road, on a grocery run and were heading toward Blythe, California. As we traveled the vast, flat expanse of the Arizona desert, an unexpected roadside sign caught our attention. On a whim, we decided to pull over.
We had no idea what it was, that we were at the Poston War Relocation Center Memorial, nor did we realize the deep irony of the date, it was December 7, 2019. To be perfectly honest, when living on the road, the calendar tends to lose meaning; so we didn’t know it was also Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
There was no visitor center, no crowds… no tour buses. The entire memorial was… just empty. Solitary it rose abruptly from the barren desert floor, a single, lone concrete spire, embossed with silent plaques. At the base of the monument, a scattering of small, brightly colored origami cranes had been placed. They rested quietly, offering a fragile and vibrant contrast to the heavy concrete and stone in the chilly desert air. Within minutes, our supply run had transformed into a sobering confrontation with a dark, nearly forgotten chapter of American history.
The Story Behind the Paper Cranes
In Japanese culture, the origami crane (Orizuru) is a sacred symbol of peace, longevity, healing, and hope. A ancient tradition holds that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes (Senbazuru) will be granted a heart’s desire, such as recovery from illness or a wish for enduring peace.
Today, descendants, survivors, and travelers carry on this tradition by folding and leaving vibrant strings of cranes at historical internment camp sites like the Poston War Relocation Center. Placed gently against the cold concrete and heavy bronze monuments, these fragile paper tokens serve as a profound, living prayer: a quiet vow to honor the memory of those incarcerated, and a collective plea that such civil rights tragedies are never repeated.
Ghost City in the Desert
The eerie stillness of that empty desert lot stands in shocking contrast to what this barren patch of land looked like eighty years ago. Between 1942 and 1945, this remote terrain was home to the Poston War Relocation Center (also known as the Colorado River Relocation Center).
The camp owes its existence to Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. Fueled by wartime panic and anti-Japanese sentiment following the Pearl Harbor attack, the order gave the military authority to clear out designated “exclusion zones” along the West Coast. Over 120,000 people of Japanese descent—two-thirds of whom were legal American citizens—were swept up in the forced migration. To build Poston, the federal government overrode the fierce legal objections of the local Tribal Council, seizing 71,000 acres of the Colorado River Indian Reservation to build a prison under the guise of an agricultural development project.
At its peak, the Poston War Relocation Center held 17,814 Japanese Americans, making it the second-largest internment camp in the nation and, overnight, the third-largest “city” in the entire state of Arizona.
The transition from civilian life to desert confinement was immediate and devastating. When the military exclusion orders were posted, families were given only a few days to settle their affairs. Forced to sell homes, farms, crops, and business assets in a panic, most lost everything they owned or were cheated out of their life savings. Allowed to bring only what they could physically carry, individuals were assigned a five-digit identification number on a cardboard tag and packed onto trains with blacked-out windows, bound for the middle of nowhere.
A Landscape of Extreme Winters
When most travelers think of the Arizona desert, they imagine blistering summer heat. While it is true that the Poston War Relocation Center’s prisoners endured suffocating summer temperatures that routinely climbed past 115°F—leading them to nickname the sub-camps “Roasten, Toasten, and Dustin”—the winter desert brings a completely different kind of misery.
The camp barracks were slapped together by contractor Del Webb using unseasoned “green” pine wood and thin black tar paper. As the desert sun dried the wood, the planks shrank and warped, leaving wide, open cracks in the walls. Standing in that empty lot in December, feeling the sharp, cold desert wind bite through my sweater, it was impossible not to think of the thousands of elderly citizens and infants who shivered through freezing desert nights behind barbed wire, relying on nothing more than a single potbellied stove to keep out the howling, dust-choked wind.
The Power of the Lone Sentinel
Today, the physical erasure of the Poston War Relocation Center is nearly complete. After it closed in November 1945, the buildings were quickly dismantled, materials were sold off, and the land was returned to the tribal nation. Nature and agriculture took back the rest.
Without that solitary 30-foot concrete spire—built in 1992 by survivors and descendants—an RVer driving by would look past it, completely unaware of the lives that intersected here. This single pillar stands as a lone sentinel, forced to bear the weight of memory all by itself.
It anchors the history of a community that refused to break. Internees built their own schools out of handmade adobe bricks, farmed the barren soil into self-sufficiency, and even stood up to their captors. In November 1942, Poston I erupted in a massive, week-long general strike after two men were arrested without due process. Thousands of prisoners stopped working, successfully forcing the administration to grant them a system of local self-governance and improved camp conditions.
The monument also holds the heavy memory of the young men from the Poston War Relocation Center who volunteered for or were drafted into the U.S. military. They fought and died on European battlefields to prove their patriotism while their mothers, fathers, and siblings remained locked behind barbed wire in this very desert landscape.
Why Every RVer Should Pull Over
Our stop at the Poston War Relocation Center Monument was an accident, born entirely of curiosity on a mundane grocery run. But looking up at that lone spire left a permanent mark on us. Years later, looking through the photos from that day, the personal timing hits even closer to home. “The Man” was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Oahu, Hawaii, during his time in the Army. Knowing he walked the same ground where the tragedy of Pearl Harbor began, while I stood in the quiet desert where its domestic fallout landed, connects our paths to this history in a way I never expected.
It is a powerful reminder of why we travel this way. History doesn’t always live in grand museums or busy national parks. Sometimes, it waits patiently on the side of a quiet highway, standing alone in the cold desert air, waiting for a passing traveler to simply pull over, look up, and remember.
RV Travel Notes:
- Location: The Poston War Relocation Center monument is located on Mohave Road, approximately 12 miles north of Blythe, California, on the Arizona side of the Colorado River.
- Access: The site features a small dirt pull-out loop. It is easily accessible for Class B and C rigs, though larger Class A motorhomes or long travel trailers should proceed with caution regarding turning space if other vehicles are present.
- Resources: To dive deeper into the history before you visit, check out archival materials via the Arizona Memory Project.
Next Week on Parker Dam Adventures: The Grand Finale!
Be sure to join us next week for the sixth and final chapter of our series, where we look back at the bookends of our time along the Colorado River. Before we ever set up our winter base camp at Parker Dam, we started our desert adventure tucked away in the rocky, dust-choked canyons of the historic Calico Ghost Town Campground in California.
And before we finally packed up and left the Parker area for good, we took one last unforgettable detour—bouncing down five miles of rugged dirt wash to grab a cold drink at the famously solar-powered, cash-only Desert Bar. It is the perfect, unvarnished ending to this leg of the journey, matching the gritty, off-grid eccentricity of the Southwest road lifestyle!
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