![]() ![]() There were small, two bedroom “A” houses, “C” houses with extra bedrooms, “D” houses with a dining room, and so forth for a total of 3,000 cemesto-type homes. They were known as “alphabet houses” because each of the handful of home designs was assigned a letter of the alphabet. Materials were in short supply, so the first houses were built of prefabricated panels of cement and asbestos or cemesto board. Most of Oak Ridge’s kitchens faced the street to minimize the length of plumbing and utility lines. ![]() Rather than performing time-consuming grading, houses were adjusted to fit the contours of the land. However, wartime constraints limited the availability of labor and materials. Architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) envisioned pleasant neighborhood communities with libraries, schools and shopping centers. Town planners were originally to provide housing for an estimated 30,000 people, but by 1945, the population had reached 75,000. The town site was in the northeast corner of the reservation, a strip less than one mile wide and six miles long with hilly terrain descending from the Black Oak Ridge in the north. While the Army and its contractors tried desperately to keep up with the rapid influx of workers and their families, services always lagged behind demand. By the end of the war, Oak Ridge was the fifth largest city in Tennessee. Nichols in command at Tennessee), estimates for the town of Oak Ridge had been revised upward to 45,000 people. By the time the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters were moved from Washington, DC to Tennessee in the summer of 1943 (Groves kept the Manhattan Project’s office in Washington and placed Col. Original plans called for the military reservation to house approximately 13,000 people in prefabricated housing, trailers, and wood dormitories. After the war, the name was again changed officially to Oak Ridge. At first, this location was known as “Site X” and later changed to the Clinton Engineer Works, named after the nearest town. ![]() Also approved was the removal of the relatively few families on the marginal farmland and extensive site preparation to provide the transportation, communications, and utility needs of the town and production plants that would occupy the previously undeveloped area. On Saturday, September 19, Groves had approved the acquisition of 59,000 acres of land along the Clinch River, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Manhattan Project engineers had to quickly build a town to accommodate 30,000 workers–as well as build the enormously complex plants.īy the time President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1942, work on the east Tennessee site where the first production facilities were to be built was already underway. In 1942, General Leslie Groves approved Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for the pilot plutonium plant and the uranium enrichment plant. Oak Ridge was the home of the uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12), the liquid thermal diffusion plant (S-50), and the pilot plutonium production reactor (X-10 Graphite Reactor). ![]()
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