The history of internment in Tennessee: Camp Forrest Foundation works to preserve, educate about the state’s past

TULLAHOMA, Tenn. (WKRN) — As discussion about immigration policy picks up, one Tennessee organization is working to make sure that the state's history is not lost to time.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the authority of the revised Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to issue presidential proclamations.

"I remember when I was in Nashville and on a Sunday afternoon when President Roosevelt announced on TV that Pearl Harbor had been bombed," Irma Troxler, an employee with Camp Forrest in the POW Department, said. "It was scary."

The act was drafted for wartime and allows a president to detain or deport citizens of an "enemy nation." Those individuals were identified as Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants in World War II. They were stripped of their property and forced into internment camps.

"FDR signed three proclamations that pretty much gave the FBI and the Justice Department — INS — the ability to go out and arrest individuals of German, Japanese or Italian descent," president and founder of Camp Forrest Foundation , Elizabeth Taylor, explained.

Camp Forrest in Tullahoma was the first civilian internment camp in the United States, holding around 800 "alien civilians" from January through November 1942. Inside the 85,000-acre camp, the detained stayed in barracks or were housed in huts. The huts often had large gaps in their paneling, making for cold winters.

By 1943, the camp shifted to housing German and Italian prisoners of war.

"The workforce — the male force — was, of course, overseas fighting," Taylor said. "So to ensure that harvest could get in on time, they employed POWs."

The population of Tullahoma was 4,500 in 1940. By the end of the war in 1945, it had grown to 75,000. According to Taylor, some prisoners of war remained in the U.S., while others returned to their home countries.

In a previous interview , Troxler told News 2 that employees tracked thousands of detainees, including prisoners of war and civilians of Japanese, German, and Italian descent who were arrested in the United States.

The camp was decommissioned and some buildings dismantled. However, it was not converted into the Arnold Engineering Development Complex until 1951.

"My goal to just make sure this history is not lost to time," Taylor said.