July 3, 1943 saw the arrival of the first tenants of “Site X,” a family who moved into a trailer slotted onto a muddy road scooped out among a maze of neighboring tracks along a 59,000 acre spread of sleepy farmland bordering eastern Tennessee’s Clinch River. In the autumn of 1942, a seismic shift from bucolic calm to hectic war effort had seized the area, and in the many months that followed, the restricted area held within its restricted 92 square miles the means to the Allied victory of World War II. Designed originally to house 30,000 specialized workers and their families, within two years, “Site X” grew to a population of 75,000, and into the name of the Clinton Engineer Works. It was the home of the USA’s top-secret pilot plutonium and uranium enrichment plants (of the Manhattan Project) that gave birth to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945, ending the war. The town was designated as Oak Ridge following the war.
A mere 20 miles from Knoxville, “them
furriners” of the secret town were easy to spot when they moseyed into the big
city during the war. Not only were their boots mud-caked, but their pockets
overflowed with cash and ration stamps. In that time of depression-era and war-time
scarcity among regular folks, such abundance allocated to those cloak-and-dagger
individuals didn’t sit well with the locals. Despite the suspicion, speculation,
and resentment on the part of native Tennesseans, the veil of secrecy was
respected, and the town’s existence and purpose stayed hush-hush until after
World War II.
Books by Linda Lee Greene are
available at Amazon.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment