Oak Ridge: The Secret City That Built the Bomb

In the early autumn of nineteen forty-two, residents of the Clinch River valley in east Tennessee received official notices telling them to leave. The notices were short. They gave families approximately thirty days. No full explanation was provided. The price offered for their land was based on depression-era assessed values in a rural county, which meant it was low. Most of the families had been farming the same bottomland for two and three generations. Some of the African American families in the displacement zone received no offer of a replacement community at all. They were simply told their land was now federal property.

Within two years, a city of seventy-five thousand people existed where those farms had been. It did not appear on any public map. It was not in the phone book. Mail was addressed to a post office box number in Knoxville. Residents who left on weekend passes were instructed not to say where they were going or where they had been. The signs inside the enrichment plants read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, let it stay here.

Oak Ridge was the uranium production complex of the Manhattan Project: four facilities designated S Fifty, Y Twelve, K Twenty-Five, and X Ten, each the size of a small industrial city. Most workers knew only their own building, their own job, their own instrument panel. The secrecy was systemic. Workers who asked questions about the purpose of their work were fired. The security precaution was designed to keep the project's purpose from any single human mind that did not need to know it.

By August of nineteen forty-five, Oak Ridge had become the fifth-largest city in Tennessee. On August sixth, nineteen forty-five, workers heard about Hiroshima on the radio, and many of them understood for the first time what they had been building. The city had been invisible. What it produced was not.

Oak Ridge transitioned after the war to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which continues as a major federal research facility today. The Manhattan Project National Historical Park, established in two thousand fifteen, preserves three sites including the Y Twelve facility. The farmland it replaced is gone. The families the Army displaced are not in the interpretive exhibits.