Site of World War II Prisoner of War Camp
Princeton, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Here in 1941, with the Hon. Sam Rayburn, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in attendance, a migratory labor camp was dedicated. With the coming of World War II later in the decade, however, federal officials converted the site for use as a camp to hold German prisoners of war. While here, the German soldiers worked on Princeton area farms, providing valuable labor assistance. For many years following the prisoners release in 1946, this site again served as a camp for migrant workers. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dedicated in 1941 with House Speaker Sam Rayburn in attendance, this began as a camp for migratory farm laborers. Once World War II arrived, federal officials converted it to hold German prisoners of war, who worked the surrounding Princeton-area farms and helped fill a wartime labor shortage. After the prisoners were released in 1946, the grounds returned to their original purpose, sheltering migrant workers for years afterward.
Why it matters
It preserves a little-known corner of the home front, when hundreds of thousands of enemy POWs were held on American soil and put to work in the fields that fed a nation at war.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The 1930s hit American farm country hard. Low crop prices, drought, and the Great Depression pushed many rural families off the land, and many of them became migrant workers who followed the harvests from place to place. As part of the New Deal, the federal government built camps to give these workers decent, sanitary places to live while they worked.
The Princeton camp was dedicated in 1941 as one of those migratory labor camps, in the blackland farm country of Collin County, north of Dallas. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, whose home district lay in this part of North Texas, attended the dedication. His presence signals how much a project like this mattered to the region.
Within months the country was at war. As millions of American men left for the military and farmhands left for defense plants, farms faced a serious labor shortage. At the same time, the United States was taking in large numbers of enemy prisoners captured overseas, and a site like this one could be put to a new use.
People & events
Sam Rayburn is the best-known name tied to this place. He was one of the most powerful members of Congress in the twentieth century and a fierce champion of rural North Texas. By coming to dedicate a camp built for farmworkers, he connected the national government's New Deal programs to his own neighbors' fields.
The war changed the camp's purpose. Federal officials turned it into a camp for German prisoners of war. The prisoners did not sit idle behind wire. They worked on Princeton-area farms, giving local growers the labor they badly needed while so many local men were away fighting.
The arrangement had an odd intimacy. Soldiers of an enemy army worked alongside Texas farm families, helping bring in crops that fed the American war effort. After the prisoners were released in 1946, the camp went back to its first job and housed migrant workers for many years.
Its place in the American story
Few Americans today realize that hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners were held inside the United States during World War II, many of them in Texas and across the South and Midwest. Small camps like the one at Princeton were part of that system. Prisoner labor became an important, if mostly forgotten, part of keeping American agriculture running.
This one site also traces a bigger arc in national policy. It began as a New Deal answer to Depression-era hardship, served the war effort, and then went back to housing the migrant workers who have long done some of the hardest work in American agriculture.
The Texas Historical Commission marked the site during the state's 1986 Sesquicentennial. The decision to record it says something: the home front was not only factories and ration books. It reached into ordinary farm towns, where the war arrived in the form of foreign soldiers working the fields.
If you visit
Little or nothing of the camp itself may survive, so come for the setting and the story more than for buildings. Stand by the marker and picture the flat, fertile farmland around Princeton as it was in the 1940s: fields to be worked, and too few hands to work them.
It can help to think of the place as three chapters on one patch of ground: a New Deal camp for struggling workers, a wartime prison camp, then a migrant camp again. Few sites tell that much twentieth-century history from one spot.
Princeton is an easy drive from the Dallas area, which makes this a good stop on a North Texas history loop through Collin County's old farm towns. Pair it with other Sesquicentennial-era markers nearby, and check local conditions and access before you go.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sam Rayburn
Related events
- · World War II
Themes & tags
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