Camp Princeton: German POWs on the Onion Prairie

During World War II the Texas Blackland Prairie became an unlikely home front, and Princeton's onion fields are one of the stranger chapters. In 1941 a migratory-labor camp was dedicated here with House Speaker Sam Rayburn on hand; once the war was on, the federal government converted the site into a branch camp holding German prisoners of war. The captured soldiers were put to work on area farms, picking up the labor that local men away at the front had left behind, and they're remembered for stonework around the town as well. This short driving loop visits the camp site — both the marker and the park that now covers the ground — and pairs it with two pioneer cemeteries that frame the small farming communities the prisoners worked among, including the vanished settlement of Climax out to the east.