 Aerial view |
 Memorial at the Merced County Fairgrounds |
The Merced Center was occupied from May 6 to Sept. 15, 1942. There were around 200 buildings at the center and it housed over 4,000 people. (Maximum population 4,508) There is a memorial there, but most of the rest of the camp no longer exists.
The Merceidan newsletter
Although there have been many books written about the Japanese-American internment, only some of them even mention the newsletters produced at the camps and, at most, they generally will have only one or two pages from one of the issues.
This is leaving out one of the most historically interesting and important aspects of the internment. The newsletters that were produced give the day-to-day news of interest to the community of those who were interned. I am sure that there were restraints on what the newsletters were allowed to print, but they still tend to contain a wealth of interesting material.
I ran across one particularly valuable source, Densho . They have a vast number of the newsletters. I found a few elsewhere.
I was able to find 19 of 20 of the twenty issues.
Issues 1 through 5
Issues 6 through 10
Issues 11 through 15
Issues 16 through 20
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
