Searching for 'Jap-town'

On July 24-27 there was some digging going on in Hanna and it wasn't by AML.

LTA, Inc., an archeological company out of Laramie, came to the historic mining town to see what they could uncover in an area that was known back in the day as "Jap-town". LTA comes at the request of AML.

"It is an outgrowth of a grouting program AML is doing," Larson said. "It was determined the grouting itself was not going to do a lot of disturbance to any of above ground property. They went through and picked out a bunch of fairly significant known sites within Hanna that they would like some more research done and recorded."

Sunshine Solaas, Hanna Basin Museum Director said the name "Jap-town" was not meant as derogatory to the Japanese residents that lived in this area of town, because this is what the residents called it. There was a large Finnish population in Hanna in the early 1900s and the area they lived in was called Finn-town.

"When a lot of these residents came to work in the mines and railroad, they were comprised of a lot of nationalities and not all could speak English well," Tom Larson, owner of LTA said. "They gravitated towards staying together and parts of the town were named after the nationalities living there."

Larson had old maps and photos of the town and it was from these, he got an idea of where the houses of Jap-town were.

Currently there is little left to identify a residential area.

Larson was not only focusing on the area that the Japanese residents lived in Hanna, but also another area where the coal and railroad executives had lived. Solass said this area was known as "Capitol Hill".

There are few clues that anyone lived in the area LTA was digging. There are a few bushes that are not native that are surviving and contours of the land that looks a bit more level.

"The coal company followed a military pattern and every piece of property that they owned, they gave a number to," Larson said. "So most coal towns, the numbers on a map were not street addresses, but numbers assigned. Looking at the map of Jap-town, we can see Japanese names on some of these numbers and trace the genealogy."

He said the community he is studying grew up around the Number Two Mine. Due to a series of disasters on the Number One Mine was closed and the Number Two Mine became the major producing mine in the early 1900s.

"Not only the workers lived near the mine, but you had the coal executives living nearby too," Larson said. "There were also office buildings for coal company in this area."

Larson points out an area that is now populated by mostly sage and other wild plants of the high desert.

Larson said it was possible some of the buildings that once stood near Number Two Mine might have been cannibalized for housing during the mining boom of the 1970s. For whatever reason, there is little to indicate there was any part of a town where Larson is digging.

"What is interesting, there was a Japanese community in almost every UP (Union Pacific) coal company town that we know about," Lsrson said. "One interesting thing about World War II is that many Japanese Americans were interred in camps, but Japanese with the coal companies were considered essential and were allowed to stay and work the mines."

He said because there are Japanese buried in Hanna Cemetery starting in 1911, it gives a rough idea when the Japanese started living in Hanna. Larson said there is no way of knowing exactly, but he estimates the Japanese disappeared around the 1950s.

The dig produced fragments of porcelain from the Japanese residential area and there was also a piece of children's cereal bowl and a silver spoon.

"Everything we found today came off the surface today," Marina Tinkcom, Larson's assistant coordinating the search for artifacts. "It never ceases to be exciting when we find something."

"What is really interesting, Reliance (a few miles out of Rock Springs) and Hanna are the only two remaining Union Pacific coal camps that still have people living in the original buildings, still having the patterns of the neighborhoods of when they were first founded " Larson said. "Almost all the others are ruin, there are no houses left."

Larson said Hanna "Old Town" is actually a rare find living museum.

"This is exciting how they are helping learn how people lived back in the time they are studying," Solaas said. She was at the site observing what was being found. "I think it is important to make sure we don't forget how important this area was to the history of the West and to the country as a whole."

Larson and his team have every intention of finding artifacts that won't let people forget Hanna's place in history, as a Union Pacific railroad company coal mining town.