The dark history of America's newest national park revealed

Set in a barren landscape miles from Denver, the Granada War Relocation Center is an unlikely tourist destination.

With its barbed wire fence and dilapidated army barracks, it is even harder to imagine as a home. 

But for 7,500 Japanese Americans, this is exactly what the concentration camp became when they were forcibly interred there during the Second World War.

The site was one of ten relocation centers set up during a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The attack prompted President Roosevelt to authorize the army to remove all persons deemed a 'threat' to national security - resulting in the mass expulsion of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

Today, the abandoned camp has been turned into the Amache National Historic Site, the US' newest national park, designed to preserve a particularly dark chapter in the country's history.

At its peak, Amache was 50 percent more crowded than New York City.

Among those packed into the one square mile lot was Dr Kirsten Leong's family, whose grandmother's maternal side was held at Amache.

She explained to the BBC that the trauma of the experience meant that it was not openly discussed in the family circle.

'The fact that I didn't know a lot about the experience is pretty common for my generation,' she explained.

Leong's grandmother, like many Japanese Americans, was given just two weeks notice that she would need to pack up an leave her home in LA.

Initially they were housed 13 miles away at the Santa Anita Racetrack, home of the famous thoroughbred Seabiscuit.

'My grandmother always wrinkled up her nose and made a face,' Leong said. 'I never understood that until I learned that three days before, the horses were living in the horse stalls.' 

These temporary processing centers were hastily cobbled together, often using the labor of those imprisoned there. 

After a few months, Leong's family was transferred to Amache, miles from the community they had known.

On arrival they would have found the camp arranged across 29 blocks, each containing 12 barracks. 

A typical family was packed into a barrack with five others, with just one bathroom to share between them all. 

The first winter at the center was particularly challenging as most of the internees were from California and had no heavy clothing. 

A family consisting of seven or fewer members was assigned to one cramped room measuring 20 by 24 feet.

They attempted to decorate the rooms to be more homely, with shelves, partitions, and crude furniture made from scrap wood.

Today, just some haunting ruins are all that remains of the once bustling community.

While the internment policy was designed to shatter the Japanese American community, prisoners worked hard to create a life for themselves within the confines of the camps.

Families grew crops, schools and hospitals were erected along with a host of stores, barber shops and sports clubs.

But beyond the barbed wire fence, armed guards patrolled the perimeter day and night.

What remains has largely been preserved thanks to the work of former Granada High School teacher and current principal John Hopper.

Hopper began documenting the history of Amache in 1993 as part of a class project before recruiting volunteers and organizations to help reconstruct some of the buildings.

Since then a decades long restoration project has been taking place at the site, renovating structures including the recreation hall and the cemetery. 

Dr Bonnie J Clark, a professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Denver, co-directs the Amache Project and conducts archaeological field work at the site every two years.

So far, she has managed to uncover sumo pits, Japanese baths, sports fields and the remnants of gardens.

'That investment in a place [where] people didn't choose to live, I think, really speaks to an insistence on your own humanity and also on taking care of one another,' Clark said.  

Plans are now in the works for a dedicated visitor's center and more educational programs.

'It's a story that needs to be told, so that it doesn't happen again,' Amache site manager Christopher Mather said.

Similar horrors to those that unfolded at Amache were taking place across the country.

Other concentration camps in the US included the likes of Tule Lake in California, Heart Mountain in Wyoming and Minidoka in Idaho.

They varied in size, but all were built on remote public land far from civilization in a bid to make life as challenging as possible.

Amache was the only camp constructed on private land, which was seized by the federal government.

It finally closed in 1945 and most of its buildings were sold off and demolished.

'They were allowed to go back 'home', but there was no home to go back to,' Leong said. 'My generation [is] now discovering, 'Oh, so why I don't know any other Japanese people. That's why we don't talk about our heritage.'

But for the 106 people who died at the camp, there was no returning to a home of any kind.

Today, the columbarium which once housed the deceased's ashes has been transformed into a monument to those who perished at the camp.

The Amache Project hopes this will ensure their stories continue to be told.