Nyssa: Sugar Beets and a Wartime Labor Camp

Nyssa sits in the Treasure Valley of eastern Oregon, just across the Snake River from Idaho, where the land is flat and the growing season for sugar beets is dependable. The Amalgamated Sugar Company's processing plant made Nyssa a company town of sorts from the early twentieth century.

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, Nyssa became the site of the first farm labor camp organized as part of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The War Relocation Authority gave Japanese Americans held in assembly centers in Portland, Puyallup, and Marysville a stark choice: remain imprisoned or come to Nyssa to harvest the sugar beet crop that Oregon farmers desperately needed. At its peak, three hundred fifty Japanese Americans lived and worked here.

They helped save an estimated one-fifth of the region's sugar beet acreage from going unharvested. The camp operated from May to November of nineteen forty-two. Their labor fed a sugar industry that continues in the valley to this day.