WENDELL, Idaho - His backyard is a maze of car parts, scrap metal and ancient farming equipment — relics that might seem worthless to anyone else but Ron Solders.
"A good junk collector never throws away anything," said Solders, a 56-year-old who owns a moving company in this rural farming community in southern Idaho.
But at the edge of the property sits something special: a government barrack that Solders salvaged from a local land owner who was going to haul it to the dump.
The National Park Service found it earlier this year while searching for the original pieces of a World War II interment camp that operated in southern Idaho during the 1940s.
The barrack was among the 400 temporary homes built at the Minidoka Relocation Center, one of 10 large camps in the western United States and Arkansas where the U.S. government detained thousands of Japanese Americans. Internees, imprisoned by their own country, worked on irrigation projects and lived behind miles of barbed-wire fence.
The National Park Service has tried to track down a dozen of the original 400 barracks that were scattered throughout southern Idaho after the Minidoka camp was disassembled. The bulk of the long, skinny barracks, measuring 120 feet by 20 feet, were given to local farmers.
The park service has proposed restoring a block of the barracks to recreate the living conditions that roughly 13,000 Japanese Americans experienced at the camp. The initiative is part of an overall plan to preserve sections of Minidoka, which became a national historic site seven years ago and now sits mostly deserted
But most of the barracks found so far are ghosts of their former selves, long since converted into homes, farming sheds, chicken and pig pens, and in one instance, a Twin Falls apartment complex.
"We have no idea how many still exist," said Patrick Taylor, who was hired in March to find the barracks.
Preservation plans at Minidoka fit into a larger, more complicated endeavor as the National Park Service and grass-roots organizations nationwide try to resurrect history that was largely buried for decades.
The camps held memories many Japanese Americans wanted to forget and actions the U.S. government worked quickly to erase.
"Most of these sites have been abandoned since they were closed," said National Park Service historian Kara Miyagishima. "No one has had the finances to preserve them."
President George W. Bush signed a bill in 2006 authorizing up to $38 million for a park service grant program aimed at preserving the sites, but two years later, the money still hasn't been appropriated.
Only two of the sites — Minidoka in Idaho and the Manzanar camp in California — have been designated as national historic sites.
While the historic classification means money and federal protection, preservation efforts at the grass-roots level have, in certain cases, proven much faster.
The Amache Preservation Society in Colorado has raised $200,000 in private donations to help preserve Camp Amache on Colorado's southeastern plains. The nonprofit society has plans to restore barracks, a mess hall, and guard tower.
At Minidoka, Taylor still has to go through several levels of federal approval before the barracks can be relocated and the park service will allocate money to restoring the structures.
"At first we were worried we weren't going to be able to find them," Taylor said. "That has turned out not to be the problem, it's what to do once we find them."
But the federal channels, although time-consuming, seem necessary in the long run, Taylor said.
History can be misleading as officials at the Manzanar National Historic Site in California discovered after spending an estimated $40,000 to relocate a mess hall, only to discover later that it was a World War II air base.
"By the time we found this out we had already spent the money," said Alisa Lynch, a park service employee at the Manzanar National Historic Site. "It's costing several hundred thousand dollars to restore it."
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