Oak Ridge was established in 1942 in Tennessee as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the massive U.S., U.K. and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb. The government bought up about 68,000 acres of land and about 1,000 Tennessee families were given two weeks or less to vacate.





The name “Oak Ridge” was chosen for the settlement in 1943 from among suggestions submitted by project employees, in part because of the settlement’s location along Black Oak Ridge, and in part because the rural-sounding name “held outside curiosity to a minimum.” All workers wore badges, and the town was surrounded by guard towers and a fence with seven gates.

The news of the use of the first atomic bomb called “Little Boy” against Japan on August 6, 1945, revealed to the people at Oak Ridge what they had been working on… [source]

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