The site is astounding in altitude (~9000′) and we didn’t appreciate it from our approach until we were driving south out that former security “gate” and were amazed at the steep terrain vistas it was like flying in a plane. But what I didn’t know was that Robt Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project had spent time in those mountains as a boy and apparently suggested the old ranch site, north of Santa Fe, as a worthy spot to develop the lab and the town to go with it. I stayed overnight in Los Alamos last spring while touring northern NM and got a kick out of that town’s “development” out of nowhere. All of the photos with people were meticulously posed. Aside from documenting the operations of the project, he spent a lot of time capturing everyday life within the 70,000 acre top secret city. Most of them were taken by Ed Westcott, who was the only person allowed to photography the Oak Ridge reservation during the Manhattan Project. More info about the photography from the U.S. The X-10 site above, now the location of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was established as a pilot plant for production of plutonium using the Graphite Reactor. It’s an interesting look back at a program that, for better or worse, drastically changed the world. To see the images from Oak Ridge during that era is incredible, even if most of the photos are staged shots of the day-to-day lives of the people that worked on this project. The scale, cost and secrecy of Oak Ridge makes it an utterly intriguing story. The Manhattan Project has long fascinated me and much has been written and said about the top-secret program. Amazingly, some people at the DOE are ACL readers and they passed along the link to all of these great pictures, knowing my curiosity for such things. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge office recently started to digitize its collection of archival photos and share them through Flickr and this group of images from the 1940s are part of those recently released. Due to the sensitive nature of the work at Oak Ridge, the entire town was fenced in with armed guards and the entire place – much like the Manhattan Project in general – was a secret of the highest concern. The completely planned community was designed by the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and had a population of more than 70,000 people.
The massive complex of massive factories, administrative buildings and every other place a normal town needs to function, was developed for the sole purpose of separating uranium for the Manhattan Project. The name chosen to keep outside speculation to a minimum, because Oak Ridge served a vital role for the development of the atomic bomb.
government acquired 70,000 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and established a secret town called Oak Ridge. In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S.
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