In October, 1942 they began to arrive, strangers, many with accents seldom heard in the vicinity. They were concerned with land acquisition and had the blessing of a wartime US government backing them. Most landowners were given six weeks to vacate their premises; a few were given as little as two weeks, frequently before the government had time to compensate them.

Several Tennessee communities were taken over by the government and replaced with a single community, one with locked gates, armed guards and check points. By March, 1943, the original visitors, the planning committee, had left while construction was being performed. The local people had seen what the government had done in the acquisition of land to build Norris Dam and they didn’t like it. This was no different, in fact, it may have been worse at this point in time.

Whatever they were building was huge and it required around the clock work and armed guards. A fence was built around the place, with seven gates. Constructed at points along the fence were gun towers. One of the buildings in the community covered 44 acres, the largest building in the world at that time! Whatever the place was, it was intended to either keep people in or keep them out!

Neighboring communities, freedom-loving Tennesseans, had doubts about the new community and the secrecy that surrounded it. In time, more and more people would move into the community behind the fence. It would become known as the Clinton Engineer Works to those in the vicinity and some in Washington D.C. On the national scale, it was completely unknown. It appeared on no maps! It was not on national maps, state road maps or even county maps, it simply didn’t exist!

For well over two years the people of the Clinton Engineer Works put in long hours. In 1943, the population in the community reached 3,000. In 1945, at the time the war ended, it was 75,000 people. Tension between the surrounding communities and the Clinton Engineer Works sometimes became obvious.

The war was quickly reaching a finishing point, a point at which a very costly invasion of Japan was going to be necessary. It was estimated that such an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of Allied Forces lives.

On August 6, 1945 a new type bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; on August 9 another was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito, through a recorded radio address to his nation, announced his plans to surrender. The war in the Pacific was over and the work of Clinton Engineer Works and the Manhattan Project was revealed to the world!

In this little mountain hamlet, uranium-235 and plutonium-239 were secretly processed for use in the world’s first atomic bomb. It was very dangerous work with the risks of radiation exposure and explosions ever present. It had to have been a distasteful task, building something for the destruction of an entire city and its population, but it was an effort to avoid the horrendous loss of Allied lives had there been a need for an invasion.

In 1948, the Clinton Engineer Works became the Atomic Energy Commission. Much of what is known about nuclear energy and radiation was learned there.

In the year 1949, someone gave the city a name; it would be known from that day forward as Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Finally, in 1959, Oak Ridge was incorporated.

And yes, today it can be found on any Tennessee map, just 25 miles north of Knoxville.

Today tourists may visit the American Museum of Atomic Energy . These tours are extremely popular and frequently crowded, but well worth the time. The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education is also located there.

For attractions around Oak Ridge, go to the Oak Ridge Vistors website.

Visit the Oak Ridge National Laboratory website and watch their videos.

Oak Ridge is located near the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, so if you can't visit the park in person, visit their website by clicking here.

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