One of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation's most important missions is to protect, preserve, and carefully manage the land it owns at the former site of the camp, and to work constructively toward those shared goals with the public agencies and private landowners in the area who own or manage other portions of the former site of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.
Below is a map of the land with the city plan of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center superimposed over top of it. State Highway 14, the main road that connects Cody and Powell passes by the camp site, is the diagonal line at the bottom right. The camp buildings that remain today are in the area marked "Chimney" and "Hospital." The Honor Roll and flagpole, which HMWF has restored, stand at the site marked "Honor Roll." The Setsuko Saito Higuchi Walking Tour traverses the land just above the words "Honor Roll" on the map. As you can see, the rows and rows of barracks, the school complex, and the community's cemetery stood on broad stretches of land that are now principally farmed.
One of HMWF's first major accomplishments was a successful fundraising campaign to underwrite the acquisition of fifty acres of land from the original site. These fifty acres originally included the Military Police installation that regulated entrance to, and exit from, the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Over 550 donors nationwide contributed a total of $262,000 to support the land acquisition. As a result, the Foundation now owns these key fifty acres with prime access from Route 14 and outstanding views of the surviving buildings and of Heart Mountain itself in the distance.
HMWF's 50 acres are directly adjacent to 73 federally-owned acres managed by the Bureau of Reclamation. The federally-owned lands contain four standing structures and a haunting chimney from the original camp complex. To have so many standing structures, in such good condition, is an extreme rarity among the sites of the War Relocation Authority's ten wartime relocation centers.
The map below will help you envision the land that HMWF owns. Our parcel is bounded by a red line. The orientations of the below map and the one above are the same -- so again, the diagonal line at the bottom right of the map below is Route 14, just as in the bottom right corner of the map above. The spot marked "Chimney" on the map above is the spot marked as number 6 on the map below. The spot marked "Honor Roll" above is the spot marked as number 9 on the map below.
Our Interpretive Learning Center will stand on the land we own, marked with the number 1 above. It will sit near the point where the internees themselves first stepped off the trains to confront the new, harsh, and unfamiliar landscape that would confine them.