During World War I, the sleepy North Carolina resort town of Hot Springs more than doubled in population as it became host to one of the largest internment camps in the country.
When the United States abandoned neutrality and declared war on Germany in April 1917, thousands of German commercial sailors were unlucky enough to be docked at American ports, including the crew of the world’s largest passenger ship, the SS Vaterland, which had been stuck in Hoboken, New Jersey since the outbreak of hostilities three years earlier.
The Department of Immigration took more than 2,300 civilian passengers and crew into custody as “enemy aliens” and transported them to Hot Springs, where the government had secured a housing contract with the historic Mountain Park Hotel.
While the officers were given rooms in the hotel, the rest of the internees were put to work constructing barracks on the lawns.
The internees also poured their creative energies into constructing a charming little village, complete with shops, gardens, a carousel and a church built of scrap lumber and tin cans.
The relationship between the internees and the locals was friendly — guards invited internees to their homes for dinner, internees held dressmaking classes for townspeople and a brass band held weekly concerts.
27 German wives and 19 children moved to the town to be closer to their interned families.
In the summer of 1918, the government began transferring the internees to a War Department camp in Georgia, to the dismay of the Germans who felt they had built a pleasant life under trying circumstances.
These photos from the North Carolina Museum of History were mainly shot by internee Adolph Thierbach and offer a glimpse into the Germans’ 19-month stay at Hot Springs.
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