Japanese Internment Camp "Gila River Project" School Library's Book on Flowering Plants and Ferns of Arizona, Stamped “Property of Gila River Project School Libraries / War Relocation Authority,” c. 1942

Gila River Project Internment Camp

Book

Internment camp copy of Flowering Plants and Ferns of Arizona from the Gila River Project School Libraries, preserving the school library apparatus of a War Relocation Authority camp for Japanese Americans incarcerated in Arizona during World War II. The stamp “Property of Gila River Project School Libraries / War Relocation Authority,” the “High School Library” date slip, and the retained circulation card checked out to “Mrs. Young” on February 21 place this volume inside the camp’s formal school system. Gila River was one of the War Relocation Authority camps created to confine Japanese Americans removed from the West Coast, and this is one of the materials which circulated within that controlled educational setting. Gila River confined more than 13,000 Japanese Americans and maintained a formal elementary and secondary school system under War Relocation Authority administration, with separate school structures in the Canal and Butte camps. The stamp in this volume identifies the bureaucratic machinery through which education was organized inside wartime incarceration.
Kearney, Thomas H., and Robert H. Peebles. Flowering Plants and Ferns of Arizona. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, 1942. USDA Miscellaneous Publication 423. This copy was held by the Gila River Project School Libraries, the school library system operating within the Gila River War Relocation Center under War Relocation Authority administration. 9" x 5" x 2", 1,069 pages. The ownership stamp, rear pastedown date slip marked “High School Library,” and retained book pocket and circulation card identify the book as part of that internal educational bureaucracy rather than a later outside institutional holding. Thick octavo in original green cloth stamped in gilt. The title page identifies Kearney as Principal Physiologist and Peebles as Associate Agronomist in the Division of Range Research, Bureau of Plant Industry. Preliminary leaves include a detailed table of contents with sections on ecological factors, geographical relationships of the flora, vegetation, and an annotated list of species, while the introduction notes Arizona’s exceptional botanical diversity and the absence of any earlier comprehensive manual for identifying its flowering plants and ferns.
The camp provenance distinguishes this copy. Gila River, divided into the Canal and Butte camps on the Gila River Indian Reservation, maintained elementary and secondary schools for incarcerated Japanese Americans, and this volume preserves the lending mechanics of that system in unusually direct form through its stamp, date slip, and borrower record. Because the book is a substantial Arizona reference work rather than casual reading matter, its use in a camp high school library points to organized classroom or instructional use within confinement, linking federal scientific publishing to wartime educational administration inside the camp. Light rubbing to cloth; text block clean and sound; library pocket, date slip, and circulation card intact; institutional stamp strong and legible. Overall good condition. An internment camp school library copy with circulation evidence still present, preserving the internal educational life of Gila River through the use of a federal Arizona flora.

Item #23360

Price: $1,700.00