On the evening of September 3, 2026, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center will open its doors for a free reception that pairs two very different ways of seeing Wyoming: the winning photographs of a statewide contest and a talk about the strange afterlife of one of the most consequential places in the state's history. The event, hosted by Wyoming Public Media and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, marks the Powell-area stop of "Wyoming's History Through Listeners' Eyes," a traveling photo exhibit born out of the state's celebration of America's 250th anniversary.
The exhibit itself began as an invitation. In 2025, Wyoming Public Media asked Wyomingites to get out with their cameras and capture the state's scenery, people, and history. The response was a flood of images from across the state, including a quick embrace from wild horses in the McCullough Peaks range at last light. From those submissions, a set of winning photographs was chosen, and each one was paired with a short audio segment telling the story behind the image. The result is a traveling exhibition that will tour Wyoming through December 2026, with each stop featuring an opening reception and a guest speaker who highlights the history of that particular corner of the state.
The September 3 reception is the exhibit's stop at Heart Mountain, and the choice of venue is no accident. The speaker for the evening is Carter Reed, the Community Projects Specialist for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, whose presentation is titled "Edison: The Vanishing Act of Wyoming's Third Largest City." Reed will discuss the history of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center site from the end of World War II in 1945 until the Interpretive Center opened in 2011 — a period that is far less known than the camp's wartime years but is, in its own way, just as remarkable.
To understand what Reed will be talking about, it helps to know what Heart Mountain was. During the war, it was a concentration camp for Japanese Americans.
When the war ended, the camp's story did not simply close. The site was transformed into postwar housing for local laborers, and then the camp was dismantled and subdivided through a national homesteading scheme. The barracks — the very buildings that had housed the incarcerated — were sold and moved off the site. Reed's talk will explore what happened to the 468 Heart Mountain barracks after they left the incarceration site and how they still impact the local landscape today. It is a story of how a place of confinement was quietly absorbed into the everyday geography of Wyoming, its history nearly erased from view.
The Interpretive Center itself is the product of a long effort to recover that history. The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation was formed in 1996 with a mission of preserving the site and educating the public about the larger story of Japanese American forced removal and confinement. The foundation restored the camp's Honor Roll in 2003 and helped secure the site's designation as a National Historic Landmark in 2007. In the fall of 2007, it launched a $5.5 million campaign to build the Interpretive Center, drawing on grants from the Japanese American Confinement Sites program and other sources. The Interpretive Center opened in 2011.
Reed is well suited to tell this story. Born and raised in Cody, he has family connections to the Heart Mountain site and has volunteered or worked at the Interpretive Center intermittently since 2012. After attending Northwest College in Powell and California State University, Long Beach, he graduated with distinction from the University of Nebraska College of Law in 2020, practiced civil law briefly back in Wyoming, and in 2022 became a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Political Communication at the University of Kansas, where his research focuses on the rhetoric of national identity during the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans and afterward. Since 2023, he has served as the Community Projects Specialist for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, helping build relationships between the foundation, its neighbors, and the local community.
The reception itself is free and open to the public, running from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Interpretive Center, located at 1539 Road 19 in Powell. After Reed's talk, guests can enjoy light refreshments, browse the winning photographs, and pick up free calendars featuring the contest photography — along with, in a nod to the state's iconic animal, free sonic bison ear buds. The project is funded in part by a Wyoming Semiquincentennial grant from the Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources office, part of the state's Wyoming 250 celebration. For those who cannot make it to Powell, the winning photographs are also available in a virtual exhibit online at WyomingPublicMedia.org. But for anyone who can stand on the ground where the barracks once stood, the evening offers something more: a chance to see Wyoming through the eyes of its people, and to hear how one of the state's most painful chapters was written into — and nearly erased from — its landscape. For more information, contact Diana Denison at [email protected] or 307-766-4240.