The Heart Mountain Relocation Center is nationally significant as one of ten relocation centers built by the War Relocation Authority for incarcerating Japanese Americans during World War II. Executive Order 9066 authorized the military to create restricted zones from which any and all people could be excluded on the basis of military necessity. The order applied only to Japanese Americans on the West Coast of the United States.

Heart Mountain was occupied from August 1942 to November 1945. At its peak, the site housed 10,767 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, in barracks surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire fences.

Information provided by the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Park Service.