Delta's Topaz Museum Brings Life to a Difficult Time in Our Past

Delta’s Topaz Museum Brings Life to a Difficult Time in Our Past

A day trip to Utah’s Southwest Desert gives a glimpse into history.

August 30, 2017

It was 30 years in the making when the Topaz Museum finally opened in July. Its director, Jane Beckwith, said, “We come together today as a community that balances immigration … with kindness, or in this case, a lack of kindness.”

The museum commemorates the internment of Japanese-Americans in southwestern Utah after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order #9066 forced more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, to leave everything they had—businesses, homes, possessions—and move to ten inland camps to live under suspicion, armed guard, and behind barbed wire until the end of World War II.

Over 11,000 Japanese-Americans were sent to Topaz between September 11, 1942, and October 31, 1945, when the camp finally closed, making it Utah’s fifth largest city at the time.

The museum is intended to help us understand our past mistakes and to respect the fragility of our democracy. It offers a glimpse into the hardships and wretched living conditions the internees faced, but is balanced by exhibits of art and personal belongings that reveal a strong community.

The museum’s collection has grown to 87 paintings created at the Topaz Art School including works by Chiura Obata, who became an art instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of the most intricate work was made from found objects. Artists gathered small shells and seeds found throughout the internment camp and fashioned them into pins, figurines, jewelry, and decorative objects. More than a dozen are on display at the museum.

The exhibits remind visitors that not a single Japanese-American was ever prosecuted or convicted for any case of espionage against the United States. One Topaz internee, Fred Korematsu, was a civil rights activist who refused Roosevelt’s order and became a fugitive until he was arrested and held in jail in San Francisco.

With the help of the ACLU, Korematsu challenged the legality of the Japanese-American internment, but was convicted of violating the president’s executive order and sent to Topaz. In 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was vacated when evidence came to light proving the government’s lawyers had lied in his case.

The internment camp site itself is 640 acres (one square mile) located sixteen miles northwest of Delta (10000 West 4500 North). The museum owns all but 6 acres of the land, and only the concrete foundations of the mess halls, barracks and latrines, as well as random artifacts, remain. Despite the lack of structures, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007. If you visit the site, leave no trace and leave what you find.

From Delta, if you head northeast through Lynndyl toward Salt Lake City, you can’t miss seeing the historic Bullion, Beck & Champion Headframe in the Tintic Mining District as you enter the town of Eureka, or the perfectly aligned trees of the orchards in Genola.

If you go southwest toward Great Basin National Park, you’ll be able to find ancient trilobites or smooth pieces of sharp-edged obsidian at nearly a dozen rock hounding sites along Highway 6 in Millard County. Before you leave Delta, stop at Delta Freeze for a grilled cheese sandwich, milkshake and, as the sign advertises, “newly installed air conditioner.”

Road trips are as much a mindset in America as they are a physical act. Seventy-five years ago, thousands of Japanese-Americans from California were forced to take a road trip they didn’t wan, anticipate, or deserve. As we hop into our truck to leave Delta, we’re reminded that the freedom to hop into that truck to explore the byways should never be taken for granted. §

The Topaz Museum is located at 55 West Main Street in Delta. It’s open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm, and is free, although donations are appreciated.

Utah History

Dina Blaes

Utah Stories

Highway 6 and the Midland Trail: Utah’s Transcontinental Highway History

From Price Canyon to Delta’s desert stretch, Utah played a central role in building the Midland Trail, one of America’s earliest transcontinental highways and the foundation of today’s Highway 6.
Podcast

Whiskey, Bullets & a Buried Town: Archaeologists Reveal Alta’s Wild Past

Before Alta was known for powder days and lift lines, it was a silver mining town clinging to the side of a narrow canyon. In the late 1800s, men lived at 8,000 feet, went underground each day, and endured winters that regularly buried buildings in snow. This past summer, that mining town resurfaced — literally — during construction at the Alta Ski Area.

To understand what Alta really looked like, you don’t begin with legend. You begin with its trash — and this time, that happened almost by accident.

Alta Ski Area was installing underground water reservoirs to support snowmaking. Because the project sits on Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest land, an archaeologist was required to monitor the excavation. No one expected the trench to produce much.

But, It did.

Artifacts began surfacing almost immediately. Enough that the Forest Service contacted the Utah State Historic Preservation Office for help. Lexi Little, who coordinates the Utah Cultural Site Stewardship Program, helped mobilize nearly 30 volunteers to assist with what quickly became a focused two-week excavation.

Winter deadlines were approaching. The pipes for the reservoirs had to go in the ground. There wasn’t time for a slow, extended dig.

“It was two weeks of digging in the dirt and helping figure out exactly what we were looking at,” Little said.

Most of the people screening soil weren’t professional archaeologists. They were trained stewards from around Utah — part of a statewide volunteer network that now approaches 500 people. They poured dirt through shaker screens, scanning for fragments that could piece together a town long buried.

“Archaeology is human trash,” Little explained. “Archaeologists are very into trash.”

Alta had left plenty behind.

https://youtu.be/hzIHzx3OGoo?si=dKcl2CEz-t6FZzYw

Victorian-style ceramics appeared first — the kind typically used in hotels. Medicine bottles followed. Ink bottles. Hand-blown glass. A porcelain doll’s foot surfaced from the soil, a small detail that shifted the mental image of the town. Families were here. Children were here. This wasn’t only a camp of miners.

The bottles helped establish time. Manufacturing details — whether glass was hand-blown or mold-made, whether a maker’s mark appeared on the base — allowed archaeologists to date many of the artifacts to the 1870s through the 1890s, when Alta was booming as a silver mining town.

“That gives you that range of dates for when Alta was really booming,” Little said.

One reusable soda bottle clearly stamped “Salt Lake City” connected the canyon to the valley economy below.

Then something unusual rolled out of a dirt pile.

A corked bottle. Intact. Liquid still inside.

To access this post, you must purchase Utah Stories (Digital + Print) or 3 month free trial (Digital).
Podcast

The Only Full Bottle of Alcohol Ever Found in Utah Was Unearthed in Alta

When a backhoe rolled a corked bottle out of the dirt at Alta this summer, no one immediately grasped what they were holding. It wasn’t empty. It wasn’t shattered. It was full. “The bottle that was discovered up at Alta is the only bottle of alcohol ever discovered in an archaeological excavation in the state…
Utah History

Brigham Young and Valley Tan: Inside Utah’s First Mormon Distillery

Brigham Young is remembered for leading the Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley, but fewer know he also oversaw Utah’s first recorded distillery in 1854. Valley Tan, a locally produced whiskey, became a staple of early pioneer commerce long before alcohol prohibition became central to LDS practice.