Richland: The Atomic City

Richland was a quiet farming community on the Columbia River until nineteen forty-three, when the federal government bought it outright. The Army needed a remote, riverside location for the most secret part of the Manhattan Project: producing the plutonium for an atomic bomb. Engineers and workers flooded in from across the country, ultimately more than forty-five thousand construction workers at the nearby Hanford Site alone.

The first reactor went critical in nineteen forty-four, and by August of nineteen forty-five, Hanford's plutonium had fueled the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Richland housed the engineers and officials. Hanford itself was racially segregated, with workers of color paid less and barred from living in Richland.

Cold War production continued for decades. In two thousand fifteen, Hanford's six-hundred-square-mile expanse became part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.