WENDELL, Idaho - His backyard is a maze of car parts, scrap metal and ancient farming equipment — relics that might seem worthless to anyone else but Ron Solders.

"A good junk collector never throws away anything," said Solders, a 56-year-old who owns a moving company in this rural farming community in southern Idaho.

But at the edge of the property sits something special: a government barrack that Solders salvaged from a local land owner who was going to haul it to the dump.

The National Park Service found it earlier this year while searching for the original pieces of a World War II interment camp that operated in southern Idaho during the 1940s.

The barrack was among the 400 temporary homes built at the Minidoka Relocation Center, one of 10 large camps in the western United States and Arkansas where the U.S. government detained thousands of Japanese Americans. Internees, imprisoned by their own country, worked on irrigation projects and lived behind miles of barbed-wire fence.

The National Park Service has tried to track down a dozen of the original 400 barracks that were scattered throughout southern Idaho after the Minidoka camp was disassembled. The bulk of the long, skinny barracks, measuring 120 feet by 20 feet, were given to local farmers.

The park service has proposed restoring a block of the barracks to recreate the living conditions that roughly 13,000 Japanese Americans experienced at the camp. The initiative is part of an overall plan to preserve sections of Minidoka, which became a national historic site seven years ago and now sits mostly deserted

But most of the barracks found so far are ghosts of their former selves, long since converted into homes, farming sheds, chicken and pig pens, and in one instance, a Twin Falls apartment complex.