Seabrook Farms was a large-scale agribusiness in southern New Jersey that became a critical site of Japanese American resettlement after World War II. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, the company employed thousands of workers from diverse racial and national backgrounds, including Japanese Americans who had been forcibly incarcerated during the war. Their experience at Seabrook offers a compelling story of survival, labor, and community rebuilding in the face of wartime trauma and postwar displacement.
In 1944, as government incarceration policies began to shift, Seabrook Farms worked with the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to recruit Japanese American workers from camps such as Tule Lake, Jerome, and Gila River. The company, led by industrialist Charles F. Seabrook, offered employment and housing to entire families under a tightly controlled company-town model. For many Japanese Americans, Seabrook was one of the few viable options to leave the camps and begin rebuilding their lives—even if under difficult and monitored conditions.
Life at Seabrook was structured around factory-like agricultural production. The company was famous for its innovations in food processing and flash freezing, and during World War II it became a major supplier of frozen vegetables to the U.S. military. Japanese American workers were integrated into this system, working in fields, kitchens, and processing plants. Housing was segregated and often overcrowded, and wages were low. Despite this, Seabrook provided a temporary refuge where families could stay together and slowly reestablish community life.
The postwar population at Seabrook was remarkably diverse. In addition to Japanese Americans, the company employed Estonian and Ukrainian refugees, African American migrants from the South, Japanese Peruvians forcibly deported during the war, and other displaced populations. These groups lived in adjacent but often separate residential “villages” and navigated complex racial and cultural dynamics. Japanese Americans at Seabrook established churches, Buddhist gatherings, youth clubs, and social organizations to support one another and maintain cultural continuity.
Seabrook Farms played a crucial but ambivalent role in the Japanese American postwar journey. While it offered shelter and work to those emerging from incarceration, it also reinforced exploitative labor structures and racial segregation. Still, for many Japanese Americans, it became the first place where they could begin to heal and assert agency after years of government detention.
Today, the legacy of the Japanese American experience at Seabrook Farms is preserved through the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and community memory. It remains an important site in the history of wartime displacement, agricultural labor, and immigrant and refugee resilience in the United States.
References
Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943–1945 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009), 98–105.
“The Spinach King,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1995.
“Seabrook Farms,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed July 10, 2025, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Seabrook_Farms/.
Rutgers University Libraries. Seabrook Farms: The History of a Japanese American Community in New Jersey. Accessed July 10, 2025. https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers.edu/seabrook_farms.
Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center. “History.” Accessed July 10, 2025. https://seabrookeducation.org/.
