The federal government built the Granada War Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Fearing that Japanese Americans might sympathize with Japan and work against…

The Hartman Gymnasium was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in about 1938–39 and quickly became an important center for athletic events and community gatherings. The school to which the gymnasium was originally attached was demolished in…

Located at the corner of East Cheyenne and South Third Streets, the Holly City Hall was built in 1938 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project designed to consolidate the town of Holly’s administrative offices and departments. It never…

The Holly Gymnasium was built in 1936–38 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The two-story Modernist building is made of local Niobrara limestone and was the only gymnasium in Holly until a new school complex was constructed in 1965. Since…

The Holly train depot opened in 1912, at the height of the eastern plains agricultural boom after the early twentieth-century introduction of sugar beets. For decades the depot linked farmers and consumers to the rest of the country by rail, allowing…

The Lamar Post Office was built in 1936 as a Public Works Administration (PWA) project. Designed by Pueblo architect Walter DeMordaunt, the building is the only Spanish Colonial Revival post office built as part of the New Deal in Colorado. It is still…

Three of the Shitara sisters, known in the contemporary press as “the Nisei Sisters,” were prisoners at the Amache concentration camp who helped two Germans escape from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp. During their trial, the third treason trial of World…

Prowers County covers 1,644 square miles of the Great Plains and Arkansas River valley in southeastern Colorado. The rectangular county is bordered to the north by Kiowa County, to the east by the state of Kansas, to the south by Baca County, and to the…

The five-building Prowers County Welfare Housing complex on the north side of Lamar was built in 1938–41 as a series of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. The one-story sandstone buildings were the only New Deal public housing complex…

Intended as a way to irrigate nearby farmland, Two Buttes Dam was built in 1909–10 on Two Buttes Creek, about seventeen miles northeast of Springfield. The resulting reservoir did not irrigate much land and was better used as a site for hunting, fishing,…

The Wiley Rock Schoolhouse, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1938, is located on Main Street in the Prowers County town of Wiley (603 Main Street in Wiley, Colorado). Originally built as an annex for the adjacent Wiley High School, Wiley…

Willow Creek Park in southeast Lamar was built primarily by the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration from 1933 to 1938. Using local labor and materials, the New Deal agencies built a series of dams for flood mitigation and…