Weedpatch Camp and the Federal Migrant Shelters

Seventeen miles south of downtown Bakersfield, on Sunset Boulevard in the community of Lamont, stands the last remaining federal migrant labor camp from the New Deal era. It is known today as the Sunset Labor Camp, but during the Dust Bowl years it was called Weedpatch Camp, and it was one of approximately fifteen federal Farm Security Administration camps built in California between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen forty-two to provide sanitary housing to the migrant workers that private growers and county authorities were failing to shelter adequately.

The camp opened in nineteen thirty-five. It offered what most migrants had never encountered in California: flush toilets, running water, showers, a medical clinic, a school, and a democratically governed community council that gave residents a voice in camp management. These were not luxuries. In the private grower camps and the roadside ditch encampments where most migrants lived, dysentery, typhoid, and malnutrition were common. The federal camps were not comfortable, but they were sanitary, and in Kern County in the nineteen thirties, sanitation was the difference between survival and not.

John Steinbeck visited Weedpatch Camp before writing The Grapes of Wrath. The camp appears in the novel as the Weedpatch government camp, where Tom Joad and his family find temporary relief from the hostility of the surrounding valley. Steinbeck's fictional rendering is close to the documented record. Camp manager Tom Collins kept detailed notes on the migrants' lives and shared those notes with Steinbeck, who used them in constructing the novel's specificity. Collins appears in the dedication of The Grapes of Wrath, named as the man who gave Steinbeck much of what he needed.

The camp continued operating as migrant housing into the twenty-first century. As of the early two thousand tens, it was still housing migrant agricultural workers in Kern County. The physical infrastructure, the small individual shelters, the common facilities, the general layout, remains recognizable from the nineteen thirties photographs Dorothea Lange took there for the Farm Security Administration. Those photographs are among the most widely reproduced documentary images in American history. The subjects of those photographs lived seventeen miles south of where you are. Some of their descendants are still in Kern County.