When the camp was shut down the buildings were sold off and torn out, but the trash - now called "artifiacts" - remains along with a small monument.
Let's play "I Spy" among the sagebrush: the foundation to a recreation hall, thousands of rusty nails and countless glass shards, burnt remains, terra cotta pots, a stove, one of many safety-pins and do-dads, and two interesting rock finds.
These are homemade inkwells carved out of rocks. Above is the ornate one displayed in the museum. To the left is an unfinished one found by a guy in our group. It was taken back to the museum.
Above the fancy inkwell is another decorative rock, I think. It looks like a pile of rocks, but it's actually hollowed out plaster and lava rocks from the mountains in the distance, with a sheet of glass embedded in between. The only use we could imagine for it was decoration. It's interesting to see that although the internees were denied their rights, their property, and were relocated to the middle of nowhere, they still found creative outlets - even if it involved collecting rocks. There were some spots where you could see somebody had whole piles of trilobites, interesting rocks, and minerals. They did have more than just rocks though; there is a lot of artwork that came out of Topaz. In fact, BYU had a display of it and the Springville art museum will be showing it too this summer. The most sobering part of the trip wasn't reading off the statistics or hearing the stories, but when we were walking around, the curator found the arm of a doll. It's hard to imagine the rows and rows of barracks now gone, but old bits of toys somehow made it more real.
So, what do you think?
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