Tucson, AZ

Prison Camp #10 / Catalina Federal Honor Camp / Gordon Hirabayashi Campground & Recreation Area (U.S. Federal Prison) 

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A | The Road

Who built this road? Who builds our highways? Why were our roads built where they are? What do our roads erase, cover over, help us not to see?

The road from Tucson to Summerhaven, Arizona snakes nearly 30 miles up into the Santa Catalina mountains—past giant saguaro cacti, through the yellows and greens of the Sonoran desert, around incredible rock sculptures and canyons. 

According to the U.S. Forest Service, the government agency that manages the road and its surrounding areas, traveling the 27 miles of the road offers the biological equivalent of driving from the deserts of Mexico to the forests of Canada — you begin in the Lower Sonoran vegetative life zone and by the end of the highway, you’ve climbed into the high forests of the Canadian zone. For the traveler, this means that every curve of the road offers breathtaking views with often dramatically different vegetation and landscapes. 

The road, today called the Catalina Highway Scenic Drive or the Mt. Lemmon Highway interchangeably, was originally named the General Hitchcock Highway, after Postmaster General Frank Harris Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who served in both the Roosevelt and Taft administrations, was one of the men most responsible for making construction of the road possible. Hitchcock purchased the Tucson Daily Citizen newspaper in 1910, during his tenure as Postmaster General, and moved to Tucson in 1928 after his time working as a federal government official. A few years earlier, Arizona state legislators had begun advocating for a new road up Babad Do’ag (Frog Mountain), which white settlers called Mt. Lemmon. Though there was a road up the north side of the mountain, it was neither convenient nor easily accessible. For wealthy and white Tucsonians, like Hitchcock, a paved road up the south side of the mountain would make it possible to access the cooler temperatures at the summit during the hot summer months. 

Initially, engineers at the University of Arizona and in private practice in Tucson were skeptical of the proposal to build the road, believing it to be “unworkable, unnecessary, and poorly thought out.” One newspaper editorial argued that the project would benefit only “those who can afford vacation homes.” In November 1928, the project was brought before voters for the first time. It failed by a two-to-one margin. 

Hitchcock was undeterred. He used his influence through the Tucson Daily Citizen to turn the tide of public opinion and his connections with federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Highway Commission, and the Treasury Department to rally government support for the project. Hitchcock received the necessary support for the proposal from Pima County in 1931, though the road would be built using federal funds. 

This was during the Great Depression and the United States was deep in economic crisis, so Hitchcock proposed and facilitated the use of convict labor to construct the highway. Using incarcerated men as laborers would keep costs down, since the men would not be paid for their work. Although Hitchcock was primarily concerned with how to get the road built, his idea of using incarcerated labor also kept in line with late Progressive Era ideas about prison reform—that people imprisoned for minor offenses, like tax evasion or selling alcohol to Native Americans (which was illegal at the time), could be “rehabilitated” through work. 

Through an agreement between the Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Arizona Highway Commission, work on the road began in 1933. A labor camp was established near Soldier Camp, just east of Tucson, and became the base for a rotating roster of imprisoned men. At first, the laborers on the road were “loaned” from a federal prison in Texas. Many were Mexican nationals who had been arrested for crossing the border “illegally” after a change in immigration policy under the Hoover administration during the Great Depression. These early laborers would later be joined by draft resisters and conscientious objectors during World War II. 

Building the road was brutal physical labor. In 1939, after the first seven miles of the road were completed, an official prison camp was built at Vail Corral. The road was completed in 1951. 

Eventually, once the road was built, the small town of Summerhaven, Arizona grew from a small outpost — an area used by the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Lowell during the Apache Wars in the 1870s and 1880s — to a retreat for tourists and wealthy Tucsonians. 

Today, the road is a popular destination for cyclists and for rock climbers, mountain bikers, and hikers, who take advantage of the campgrounds and recreational areas that dot the side of the road. Though there are reminders and remainders of the prison all over the mountain, it’s easy to not see the unfree labor and forces of settler colonialism that form the underpinnings of this beautiful road. 

Thinking about the history behind this road clashes with the beauty of the scenery, especially when we know that a prison was built so that the road could be built, so that wealthy white folks could escape the summer heat in Tucson. 

Knowing this raises questions about the roads and highways that we travel on in our everyday lives. What do we learn to see when we ask: Who built the road? Who builds our highways? Why were our roads built where they were? What do our roads erase, cover over, help us not to see?

B | Gate to Staff Housing

If you park in the parking lot for the Gordon Hirabayashi Campground and Recreation Site, located on Prison Camp Road off of General Hitchcock Highway, you enter the site close to the original Main Gate. 

Less than one-quarter mile north of the original Main Gate (close to where the interpretive sign is today), at a slightly higher elevation than the rest of the camp, are several concrete foundations, leftover from the small cottages where prison staff lived beginning in 1939.   

The gate to the staff housing is in ruins today, but its impressive beauty remains. The prison staff and their visitors would have driven over a gracefully designed and built stone bridge to access the staff housing area. 

The entrance to the staff housing area, even today, feels out of place with the rest of the prison camp area. It is beautiful, peaceful. In many ways, it is a reminder of why the road was built and why the prison was established in the first place—to make it easier for wealthy white Tucsonians and tourists to visit the cooler climates at higher elevations during the summer for recreation and relaxation.  

C | Staff Housing

North of the main area of the camp were fifteen cottages where prison staff lived — everyone from guards to vocational instructors, as well as the wives and children of the staff. The fact that the concrete foundations of many of these houses remain implies that they may have been of sturdier construction than the barracks and other buildings. The holes in the concrete floors make it possible to see that each cottage had its own bathroom. 

Looking out from the staff cottages, it is possible to see past the remains of barracks and the rest of the prison camp and focus on the beauty of the surrounding scenery. For the few families who lived in the staff housing from 1939 to 1951, it might have been possible not to see how they how they contributed to upholding the system of unfree labor that built infrastructure for wealthy white Tusconians. 

It is difficult to find details about the staff who ran the prison camp, or even rough demographics of these workers and guards. Knowing the time and its ethos, though, it is possible that at least some of the staff were reformers, who believed that the “work skills” gained by the men imprisoned and building the road would help to “rehabilitate” them. Most likely the guards were white, possibly from the Tucson area. The superintendent of the prison camp during World War II was Charles B. Mead. Claude Hillman, an engineer, was superintendent of the road building project. 

Today, there are seven minimum-security Federal Prison Camps (FPC) in operation in the United States. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, these institutions have “dormitory housing, a relatively low staff-to-inmate ratio, and limited or no perimeter fencing.” Similar to Prison Camp #10, these prisons are work-oriented. In addition to the seven lone-standing FPCs, some other federally run prisons have small minimum security prison camps adjacent to the main facility, called Satellite Prison Camps, that provide inmate labor to the main, higher security prison and to off-site work programs.

D | Playground 

Up on a small hill, between the staff housing and the rest of the prison, are the remains of a small playground. Today, the playground is an easy-to-miss slab concrete foundation with a few holes drilled in to indicate where metal poles to hold up swings, or maybe a small slide.

remains of the small playground

In the midst of the remains of a prison, the playground's remains serve as an unsettling reminder of the fact that children lived at the prison camp and that the adults in their lives normalized their presence to the extent that they added a task for the imprisoned men working  at the site — to build an area for their children to play. While the playground’s existence might imply that there was a relationship of trust and a feeling of safety between the men who were prisoners and the people that were in charge of guarding them, its remains can also serve as a warning. 

How can we ensure that prisons and unfree labor do not continue to be such a foundational part of the fabric of the United States that imprisoned folks are deployed to build playgrounds? How do we teach ourselves that prisons do not need to be a normal part of communities? How do we make this a reality for younger generations?   

E | Barracks

If you visit this site in its operating season, roughly between October and May, you will find tents, campers, and cars lined across the center of the campground.  As you look at the drone imagery, imagine large, three-pronged “T-shaped” barracks to the right of the road. This is where the majority of the 46 incarcerees and internees were held in segregated barracks. Hopi draft resisters were housed in “Barracks C,” or the mixed-race barracks.

F | Baseball field

Today at the Gordon Hirabayashi Campground and Recreation Site, past each of the areas where RVs park and families set up tents to camp, the furthest flat area you can walk to from the parking lot, there’s a large gravel loop. The loop, now a reserved group campsite, also serves as a horse corral for the occasional equine visitor. At the far southern edge of this loop, hiking and mountain biking trails disappear up into the hills or down towards the “Prison Camp Climbing Area,” a popular rock climbing area for locals and tourists alike.

If you stand at the opening of this gravel loop, with your back to the camping areas, the shape of the corral starts to look vaguely familiar. Allowing your eyes to focus on just the outline of the loop, letting the occasional picnic table, wooden hitching post, and metal gate fade away, the “loop” starts to look more and more like a baseball field, the hills beyond serving as the outfield fence. 

When they weren’t laboring on the road or working in other roles at the prison, the men at Prison Camp #10 passed the time by taking vocational classes, designing and constructing elaborate stonework features around the camp, and by playing sports like baseball. 

Archaeologists Mary Farrell and Jeff Burton have noted inscriptions around what would have been the bleachers and dugout area that read “1957,” “ETO,” “IGM,” “MANUEL FLOREZ,” and “ER” — implying that the field most likely continued to be used as a recreation area even after the road was completed and the camp transitioned to a Border Patrol and later a juvenile detention center. And beyond their temporal implications, these inscriptions suggest that this area was of some significance to the people imprisoned at this site, since several folks chose to carve their initials, their name, the year they were there, into the concrete.

G | irrigation system 

Before the prison camp could be operational, the men needed to build a working irrigation system, for a water supply and for the sewage system. The site itself did not have access to water. According to Forest Service archaeologist Bill Gillespie, the men built two water lines, one from up the canyon and another from a site some miles away, called Sycamore Spring.

H | Sawmill

Near the edge of the prison camp, the men built a sawmill and a lumber drying building. Wood was used as fuel for heat and for cooking while the camp was in operation. According to forest archaeologist Bill Gillespie, the prison camp burned roughly 8,000 cords of wood a year. In later years, as work on the highway neared completion, the men started using the sawmill for other work, like making signs for the Forest Service, for nearby towns, and for the county. 

I | Native markings

The history of a place does not begin with the first evidence of colonization or settlement, and this is particularly true of Catalina Federal Honor Camp, housed in one corner of the Coronado National Forest. In 1902, the land now known as Coronado National Forest was taken from local tribes  by the US government and transferred to the US Forest Service. Today, across 12 federally recognized Native American tribes have direct sovereign ties to the land: the Ak-Chin Indian Community, the Fort Sill Chiricahua-Warm Springs Apache Tribe, the Gila River Indian Community, the Hopi Tribe, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.

In order to preserve these markings and avoid potential vandalization, the exact location of this point of interest is not located on the map. 

Native markings carved in a rock wall

J | Informational bulletin

In 1999, the Coronado National Forest renamed the ruins of the prison camp the Gordon Hirabayashi campground in honor of Dr. Hirabayashi. This informational sign (PDF linked here) narrates the experience of Japanese and Japanese American  incarcerees at the site in World War II. As you continue to review the rest of the site’s history, ask yourself whose histories are left out from this narrative? 

Early History

The history of a place does not begin with the first evidence of colonization or settlement. This is particularly true of Catalina Federal Honor Camp, housed in one corner of the Coronado National Forest. In 1902, the land now known as Coronado National Forest was taken from local tribes  by the US government and transferred to the US Forest Service. Today, 12 federally recognized Native American tribes have direct sovereign ties to the land: the Ak-Chin Indian Community, the Fort Sill Chiricahua-Warm Springs Apache Tribe, the Gila River Indian Community, the Hopi Tribe, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.

Between 1933 and 1939, prisoners at an established penal colony on the base of Mount Lemmon began building a road from Tucson to what is now Catalina Federal Honor Camp. In addition, they built the infrastructure for the camp itself including rock structures, major buildings, and the irrigation systems. The vast majority of these prisoners were Mexican border crossers. For much of the late 1800s and early 1900s, laborers moved freely between the United States in Mexico. In 1924, Congress established the United States Border Patrol, which for the first time began to arrest migrants and laborers for crossing the Border region. Once arrested, male border crossers would be forced to labor for free until their “term” as an incarceree was complete. 

Given that the camp was so isolated in a harsh and arid landscape, there were no walls or fences to this “Honor” camp. Instead, large boulders were painted white to mark the perimeter of the prison.

Wartime

During World War II, the camp was repurposed to house draft resistors, including conscientious objectors who identified as Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs), Hopi tribal members, and members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Molican Brethren, and Independents. In 1943, Gordon Hirabayashi, known for defiantly refusing curfew orders in a case argued in front of the Supreme Court, was the first Japanese American draft resister to arrive at the prison. Over the next year, approximately 45 Japanese American draft resisters (nicknamed “The Tusconians”) were also sent to the Honor Camp. Most were from the Granada/ Amache Relocation Center in Colorado, though others came from Poston and Topaz. Over the duration of the war, the men continued to build the federal highway—learning to run heavy machinery and dynamite their way through the hard Arizona soil.

To learn more, listen to the University of Arizona’s “Tusconian Oral History Project,” which preserves oral histories of several of the Japanese American resisters of conscience who served sentences at the Catalina Federal Prison.

After Incarceration

From 1951 to 1967 the camp was a juvenile detention center for largely Native youth who were forced to work in the sawmill operation. In 1967, Prison Camp #10 was transferred to the State of Arizona to operate a euphemistically titled “youth rehabilitation center” for Native youth in partnership with researchers from the University of Arizona. Other reports called the site a “trades training center” for Native youth from Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Newspaper reporting from the time suggest that the Native “youth rehab center” was ideologically aligned with earlier Native Boarding School initiatives that prioritized assimilation into white-coded and capitalist-oriented society.

Rumors of wide-spread abuse at the center reached a crescendo in the early 1970s when a youth who escaped from the center reported that he was locked in a meat locker for days with little food or water. The FBI eventually conducted a full investigation. 

The camp was leveled in 1973.

In 1999, the Coronado National Forest renamed the ruins of the prison camp the Gordon Hirabayashi campground in honor of Dr. Hirabayashi. 

Let’s Dig Deeper

Invitation to storytelling and restorative history work

The site histories we’ve shared on this page only scratch the surface of the memories and stories tied to former Prison Camp #10 and its many afterlives. If you have stories or memories that you would be open to sharing with us—especially stories about the region before settlers built the road to Summerhaven or histories tied to the “rehab center” for Native youth that ran in the 1970s—we would love to be in conversation with you, in whatever form those conversations might take. We are inspired by the frameworks provided by the Center for Restorative History at the National Museum of American History, which call for centering communities who have experienced harm or historical exclusion and collaborating with those communities to understand their desires and needs. Our work aims to apply these frameworks to our methods, so that we can contribute to memorialization projects that disrupt the erasure of certain layers of history. 

We would love to hear from you and to think together about how we can collaborate! Please reach out to us via email at seeingmemory@gmail.com. 

Works Cited

For more general information, see our resources page. 

  • Cherstin Lyon, Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory (Temple University Press, 2012)

    Irons, Peter. Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases . New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

  • J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord, R. Lord. Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites, "Chapter 18: Catalina Federal Honor Camp, Arizona." National Park Service: 2000.

  • “Camp Changes Dreary Life for Wetbacks,” Tucson Daily Citizen, October 1, 1952 (p. 22)

    “Prisoner Found to Be Indian Center Escapee” (date, paper unknown?)

    “Funding Difficulties Plague Indian Youth Center Program,” Arizona Daily Star, October 18, 1971 (p. 15)

    “FBI probes story of Indian abuse,” Tucson Daily Citizen, April 26, 1972 (p. 30)

    “New Approach is Planned at Indian Youth Center,” Arizona Daily Star, March 1, 1970 (p. 7)

    “Boys Camp to House Indians,” Arizona Daily Star, June 28, 1969 (p. 1)

    “Nomadic Border Patrol Gets Home of Its Own Here Finally,” Arizona Daily Star, June 27, 1947 (p. 2)

    “171 at Catalina Prison Camp are Selective Service Cases,” Arizona Daily Star, August 6, 1944 (p. 6)

    “New Mt. Lemmon Highway Soars High Into Regions of Gorgeous Mountain Scenery;” “Prisoners in Honor Camp Build Trail,” Arizona Daily Star, February 21, 1941 (p. 88)

    “Indian to Have His Own Camp: Papago Reservation Will Be Site of Several Erosion Units,” Arizona Daily Star, May 1, 1933

    “UA Study of Camp Okayed,” Arizona Daily Star, May 20, 1967 (p. 17)

  • Bill Gilllespie, “People and Politics Behind the Construction of the Catalina Highway to Mount Lemmon,” Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, December 1, 2020