Fresno’s Pinedale neighborhood was born in the roaring 20s as a company town for the Sugar Pine Lumber Company. But the story didn’t end when the company went bankrupt in the Great Depression. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots, the story of Pinedale, after the mill closed down.
Within a few years, the site went from housing lumber operations to housing cotton operations. Valley Compress bought the site, and used it to store locally grown cotton.
All that changed with the dawn of World War II. The U.S. government took over the site in Spring 1942. It first served as the Pinedale Assembly Center. For three months in 1942, the site held 5,000 Japanese Americans against their will, in a temporary concentration camp. The detainees were then sent to permanent facilities elsewhere…