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A chance meeting helped bring into perspective the work of FFA Architecture & Interiors associate partner Barbara Clement for the National Park Service in Southern Idaho.

While visiting the Minidoka National Historic Site to inform the Portland-based firm’s efforts to add amenities to the park, she met a man who lived there when it was a Japanese internment camp. The man, now in his 80s, and family members had traveled by car from Utah to see what remained of Minidoka.

He told Clement he was too young at the time to realize what the ramifications would be from his family and others of Japanese descent being forced to live there during World War II. But he picked up on the emotions of the adults surrounding him.

“He said there was always this foreboding, unsure tension among the grown-ups,” she recalled. “There was always this cloud looming because they didn’t know how long they’d be (at Minidoka).”

From 1942 to 1945, Minidoka housed almost 13,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans mostly from Oregon, Washington and Alaska. It was one of 10 isolated relocation centers in the western U.S. where nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were moved following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many internees lost their homes, jobs and businesses while at the camps.

“It kind of hit home that we have to have some sort of support materials for people to make peace with these horrendous things that happened to them,” Clement said.

FFA and KPFF Consulting Engineers are working to improve the visitor experience at the 400-acre historic site, which currently has few educational resources and cannot accommodate full-time park staffers. The team is working on plans to renovate a farmhouse into park administrative offices, and restore and expand a former warehouse into a visitors’ center. Both projects are relatively small and together are estimated to cost only $2.8 million, but the impact will be huge, Clement said.

“As an architect, it’s really not glamorous and it’s really not about us,” she said. “It’s helping to support visitor services so we’re part of a larger cultural understanding. That’s what’s gratifying.”

The planned administrative offices and visitors’ center are part of an overall National Park Service effort to better accommodate former internees and their families who make pilgrimages to the site, Minidoka superintendent Judy Geniac said. The projects are slated to finish by 2017, and will allow the presence of full-time park staffers who can offer more educational tours to school and community groups. Minidoka also hosts an annual civil liberties symposium.

“We are seeing increased visitation,” Geniac said. “Even on the coldest winter days, there are people on the site.”

Along with providing more amenities, the National Park Service is working to restore site portions that were almost completely dismantled after Minidoka closed down. This includes reconstruction of a guard tower and a portion of a barrack block to help visitors get a sense of what it was like while in operation.

After the war, the more than 600 barracks and other buildings that made up the 33,000-acre camp were given away to residents of nearby communities for uses including residential, educational and utility. The National Park Service has recovered two of those buildings – a mess hall that had been repurposed into a canning kitchen and a barrack that had been used as an auto shop – and plans to restore them to reflect their original purpose.

It was especially important to the former internees that at least part of a barrack block be restored, said Carol Ash, Minidoka chief of interpretations and education.

“What is really exciting is most of the pilgrims that come are just so excited that the site is being recognized (and) that it has not been forgotten,” she said. “Any group could suffer this if the conditions were right, and that’s the story they want people to know.”

That’s the beauty of the efforts to restore Minidoka, Clement said.

“You think about what happened on this site and the enormous story for civil rights,” she said. “Minidoka and all those internment camps are part of a dark history. We’re now realizing as part of civil rights education we need to acknowledge (this happened).”