Pine Grove Furnace: Secret POW Interrogation Site

A mile up the road from here, tucked into the Michaux State Forest, was one of the most classified installations of World War Two. The United States War Department operated a secret prisoner interrogation facility at this site, one of only three such locations in the entire country. Thousands of German and Japanese prisoners passed through, questioned about weapons development and Axis military operations.

The land had been an iron furnace farm until the state bought it in the early nineteen hundreds, then a Civilian Conservation Corps camp from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen forty-two. After the war it became Camp Michaux, a church retreat, from nineteen forty-seven to nineteen seventy-two. Today it is public forestland, and almost nothing marks what happened here during the war years.