State and federal environmental regulators recently toured a property in Harlowton that the railroad company Milwaukee Road left behind when it went bankrupt more than 40 years ago.
The city received funding through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields program to clean up petroleum and other contaminants at the site.
The rail yard and buildings were a historic center for immigrants who traveled from Japan to Montana to work the railroads in the early 20th century, like the paternal grandfather of Janelle Fulbright (née Satake).
Her late father was one of ten siblings, and they lived between the roundhouse and the Musselshell River.
“Dad said it was a pretty tough time, but life in general was pretty good,” Fulbright said.
“They had two wooden boxcars fabricated together, and dad said it was always very, very hot in there in the summers and very, very cold, of course, in the winters.”
Fulbright said she hopes the site will become a place to educate visitors about the community’s Japanese population, around 200 people at its largest.
She described a shift in her family’s life after Pearl Harbor, which fostered suspicion and prejudice against Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Fulbright said community members took responsibility for her family and other Harlowton residents of Japanese descent and prevented the U.S. government from imprisoning them in internment camps.
“However, they did have a peg-legged government worker in a camper [or] whatever come out and live there for two or three years to watch over the Japanese to make sure they wouldn’t sabotage the trains and that sort of thing,” Fulbright said. “My grandfather lost his job in the roundhouse for fear of that sabotage.”
Fulbright said she’d like to see the roundhouse repaired and repurposed as an interpretive center to capture the contributions of Japanese Americans.
An environmental assessment released earlier this year outlines the use of chemical oxidation to treat petroleum contamination at the property.
