The Topaz internment camp, used during World War II to incarcerate thousands of Japanese Americans, is a relatively well-known piece of Utah’s history.
Fewer Utahns know the story of Keetley Farm, created by a handful of families who fled from California’s Bay Area to Wasatch County to avoid being sent to a camp.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.S. military leaders ordered that all people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, must leave the West Coast.
At first, it wasn’t clear how quickly families had to evacuate. But in late March of 1942, the situation dramatically changed, as Tom Endo explained.
“It was March 26 when it was determined that we had to leave California by the 29th of March, so that was a four-day period we had to finalize everything and get out of California,” he said.
He was not quite 2 years old when his family made the journey from Oakland to Keetley, a mining town near what is now Hideout.
As an adult, Endo asked his father, Frank Endo, about his experiences during World War II and wrote down the history of the Japanese American community at Keetley.
The family chose Utah because they had heard rumors that people in Nevada would not welcome Japanese Americans. Utah was the next closest state.
Frank Endo, his brother-in-law, and another leader named Fred Wada met with the Keetley mayor, who agreed to let the group come and farm.
But Tom Endo said if the men had seen the land first, they might have reconsidered the move.
“The land was terrible,” Endo said. “When my father and Fred Wada and my father’s brother-in-law visited Keetley, there was about a foot of snow on the ground. So my father’s brother-in-law, Roy, who was a farmer – he really couldn’t assess whether it was good farmland or not.”
When spring came, the families saw the land was covered in rocks and had no irrigation. Out of 4,000 acres, only around 40 acres were ever cultivated – not nearly enough to feed the original group of about 130 people.
That wasn’t the only challenge. Fred Wada’s daughter, Mary Wada, said some locals were hostile to their new neighbors.
“Keetley Farm is a story of very courageous people who took a risk of being on their own,” she said. “You know, out of the 29 counties, only two counties in Utah accepted the Japanese Americans, and that says an awful lot. Even dynamite was thrown onto the Keetley Farm’s area – it still told us that we were being threatened and [weren’t] wanted there.”
Wada was a baby when her family made the exodus to Keetley. Her family stayed there for three years.
She said the adults in the group were “horrified” by all they had to do to make the land viable for any farming, and they often labored 16 hours a day. But she also remembered that her father had good memories of the family’s time in Utah.
“My father loved Keetley,” she said. “He loved that valley. He even made up songs and lyrics about the Keetley valley, because it was just beautiful with the mountains and the rivers and what have you.”
Frank Endo did not have such a positive experience. His son said he saw the farm as a failure, and he wouldn’t talk about Keetley unless asked directly.
The Endo family stayed for just three months before trying their luck elsewhere in Utah: Sandy, Draper, Holladay, Salt Lake City.
Other families left soon after arriving, too. According to history compiled by Tom Endo, one family went from Keetley to the Topaz internment camp because the mother was worried she couldn’t provide for her four young children.
Endo estimated the number of people at Keetley Farm went from 126 to about 60 by the end of 1942.
He said his family left everything behind in Oakland: their community, their property, their livelihood.
“It was very unsettling,” he said. “We really didn’t have a permanent home for three years; we were just moving around, trying to find a place to live and sleep. And we were just like nomads.”
Nevertheless, Tom Endo said he and his family could have done worse than Utah for a place to land during and after the war.
“We encountered very little discrimination,” he said. “The Keetley area was a Mormon community, and because of the discrimination they faced – the fact that they had to leave the Midwest to come to Utah to avoid the persecution they had – they were kind of sympathetic to our cause, so they treated us very nicely.”
Mary Wada said although her family lost everything from their life in Oakland, they were grateful for the relative freedom they had in Wasatch County, compared to those who were taken to internment camps.
When the reservoir was filled in the 1990s, it put Keetley underwater.
Wada said it’s important to know that piece of history.
“I think Keetley represents courage: a little community of courage and belief,” she said.
She said she’s troubled to see the current crackdowns on immigration.
“I hate to see what’s happening now, but something similar is happening,” she said. “These people who are being harassed love this country, and it’s just sad to see – and painful to see it happening, somewhat, again.”
Diana Tsuchida founded an organization called Tessaku to preserve the stories of survivors. Tessaku, which roughly translates to “barbed wire,” is the same name as a magazine created by Japanese Americans who resisted incarceration and were sent to an internment camp in Tule Lake, California.
Tsuchida has dedicated the past decade to listening to the memories of Japanese Americans who were forced from their homes during World War II.
Her father and her grandparents were taken to the internment camp in Topaz.
She said she’s interviewed over 100 survivors and witnessed the lingering trauma of the camps, and she’s worried about rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S.
“When you can empathize with the fact that this targeting could have happened to any group, I think that’s what a lot of people need to understand, and that it’s not so foreign or distant to them,” she said.
Tsuchida said people who want to learn more about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II can listen to the oral histories she’s gathered online and hear from the survivors in their own voices.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan formally apologized to the survivors of the internment camps.
Work is in progress to install new historic plaques at Jordanelle State Park to teach visitors about Keetley Farm and the Japanese Americans who tried to rebuild their lives in Utah. A timeline for the plaques has not yet been finalized.
