The story
Topaz was a city no one chose: from September 1942 the War Relocation Authority confined more than 8,000 Japanese Americans — most of them U.S. citizens from the San Francisco Bay Area — on a mile-square grid of tarpaper barracks in the Sevier Desert. For its three years, it ranked among Utah's largest cities, with schools, newspapers, art studios, and guard towers.
It closed in October 1945; the barracks were sold off across Utah, leaving concrete slabs, roads, and artifacts in the greasewood. The site is a National Historic Landmark, interpreted by the Topaz Museum in nearby Delta, and it is held by many as sacred ground — the spot where guard James Wakasa was shot in 1943 remains a place of remembrance.
We chart Topaz with the other vanished towns because it was one — a functioning city erased — while noting plainly that its residents did not choose it, and its story is confinement, endurance, and art made under guard.
What remains today
The full street grid, barracks slabs, and scattered artifacts on open desert (leave everything in place), with the excellent Topaz Museum in Delta holding an original barrack.
Questions from the field
- What was Topaz?
- A War Relocation Authority camp that confined over 8,000 Japanese Americans from 1942–45 — briefly one of Utah's largest population centers, now a National Historic Landmark interpreted by the Topaz Museum in Delta.
- Can you visit the Topaz site?
- Yes — start at the Topaz Museum in Delta for context, then drive the open site. Everything on the ground is protected; photography yes, collecting never.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Topaz — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Topaz's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Sources consulted
- — National Historic Landmark — Topaz Relocation Center
- — Topaz Museum, Delta, Utah
- — War Relocation Authority records (NARA)