The Secret U.S. Town Evacuated for Science
In 1943, thousands were quietly evicted from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to make way for a top-secret atomic project that changed world history.
In the midst of World War II, a rural landscape in East Tennessee was transformed almost overnight. Few today realize that this transformation involved the quiet eviction of entire communities from around a place called Oak Ridge, which would become home to one of the most secretive and impactful scientific endeavors in history: the Manhattan Project.
With the war raging and the race for an atomic bomb underway, U.S. military planners identified the need for a remote site, far from prying eyes and close enough to critical resources like electricity and water. After surveying many areas, the War Department selected 60,000 acres of farmland and woodland along the Clinch River. Families living there, some for generations, were given just weeks or even days to vacate their homes. Letters and telegrams arrived, quietly invoking eminent domain. In total, nearly 3,000 people from the communities of Scarboro, Wheat, and Elza were displaced with little explanation—the true purpose of their eviction was a closely guarded secret.
Almost overnight, fences and guards appeared, and construction crews rolled in. A brand new city, Oak Ridge, emerged from the wilderness, built to house tens of thousands of scientists and workers. By 1945, Oak Ridge was Tennessee’s fifth-largest city, yet it did not appear on any maps. Residents had to show passes at checkpoints and agree to secrecy. Street signs were coded to maintain confusion for outsiders and even those who worked there. Mail was simply addressed to “P.O. Box 1.”
Inside this closed world, some of the most advanced scientific experiments of the time were taking place. The factories churned day and night to process uranium and plutonium, key ingredients for the atomic bomb. Most workers did not know what they were building—they were told only that their work was vital to winning the war. It wasn’t until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 that most Oak Ridge residents learned the true nature of their work.
The town itself was an unusual mix of security and sudden social freedom. Because the government had to attract brilliant scientists and a large workforce on very short notice, Oak Ridge offered amenities and integrated employment opportunities ahead of their time. Women held technical jobs in large numbers, and Black residents worked in the city, albeit within a segregated system. For several years, Oak Ridge was a place of extraordinary cultural and scientific change, condensed into a few square miles and surrounded by barbed wire.
After the war, the sense of secrecy slowly faded, but Oak Ridge remained central to American nuclear research. Former residents whose land had been taken sometimes returned to see what had become of their farms and towns, often with mixed emotions.
Today, some of the original buildings are preserved as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, but the story of the sudden transformation of Oak Ridge, and the lives quietly uprooted in service of wartime science, remains less than common knowledge. Most Americans are only vaguely aware that such a place ever existed—a whole American town, erased and remade in the shadows, to change the course of world history.
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