Oak Ridge, Tennessee Oak Ridge, Tennessee Official seal of Oak Ridge, Tennessee Oak Ridge is a town/city in Anderson and Roane counties in the easterly part of the U.S.
Oak Ridge's populace was 29,330 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Knoxville Metropolitan Area.
Oak Ridge's nicknames include the Atomic City, the Secret City, the Ridge, and the City Behind the Fence. Oak Ridge was established in 1942 as a manufacturing site for the Manhattan Project the massive American, British, and Canadian operation that advanced the atomic bomb.
As it is still the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientific evolution still plays a crucial part in the city's economy and culture in general.
The earliest substantial occupation of the Oak Ridge region occurred amid the Woodland reconstruction(c.
The Oak Ridge region was largely uninhabited by the time Euro-American explorers and pioneer appeared in the late 18th century, although the Cherokee claimed the territory as part of their hunting grounds.
During the early 19th century, a several rural farming communities advanced in the Oak Ridge area, namely Edgemoor and Elza in the northeast, East Fork and Wheat in the southwest, Robertsville in the west, and Bethel and Scarboro in the southeast.
According to small-town tradition, John Hendrix (1865 1915), an eccentric small-town resident regarded as a mystic, prophesied the establishment of Oak Ridge some 40 years before assembly began.
And there will be a town/city on Black Oak Ridge and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's Place.
When the Governor of Tennessee Prentice Cooper was officially handed by a junior officer (a lieutenant) the July 1943 presidential proclamation making Oak Ridge a military precinct not subject to state control, he tore it up and refused to see the MED District Engineer Lt-Col James C.
The K-25 uranium-separating facility by itself veiled 44 acres (18 ha) and was the biggest building in the world at that time. The name "Oak Ridge" was chosen for the settlement in 1943 from among suggestions submitted by universal employees.
The name related to the settlement's locale along Black Oak Ridge, and officials thought the rural-sounding name "held outside curiosity to a minimum." The name wasn't formally adopted until 1949, and the site was referred to as the Clinton Engineer Works (CEW) until then.
Starting in October 1942, the United States Army Corps of Engineers began acquiring more than 60,000 acres (24,000 ha) in the Oak Ridge region for the United States' Manhattan Project.
The manner by which the Oak Ridge region was acquired by the government created a tense, uneasy relationship between the Oak Ridge complex and the encircling towns that lasted throughout the Manhattan Project. Although initial residents of the region could be buried in existing cemeteries, every coffin was reportedly opened for inspection. The K-25, S-50, and Y-12 plants were each assembled in Oak Ridge to separate the fissile isotope uranium-235 from natural uranium, which consists almost entirely of the isotope uranium-238.
During assembly of the magnets, which were required for the process that would separate the uranium at the Y-12 site, a shortage of copper forced the MED to borrow 14,700 tons of silver bullion from the United States Treasury to be used for electrical conductors for the electromagnet coils as a substitute. The X-10 site, now the locale of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was established as a pilot plant for manufacturing of plutonium using the Graphite Reactor.
Merrill moved to Tennessee to take charge of designing the secret buildings at Oak Ridge. He directed the creation of a town, which soon had 300 miles (480 km) of roads, 55 miles (89 km) of barns track, ten schools, seven theaters, 17 restaurants and cafeterias, and 13 supermarkets.
The initial streets encompassed several chief east-to-west roads, namely the Oak Ridge Turnpike, Tennessee Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, Hillside Road, Robertsville Road, and Outer Drive.
Construction personnel swelled the state of war populace of Oak Ridge to as much as 70,000.
The news of the use of the first atomic bomb against Japan on August 6, 1945, revealed to the citizens at Oak Ridge what they had been working on.
Oak Ridge was advanced by the federal government as a segregated improve as a requirement by the Southern bloc of Democrats in Congress to authorize funding for the project.
After the war, all hutments were dismantled, and a colored neighborhood of permanent homes was advanced in the Gamble Valley region of Oak Ridge, which amid state of war had been occupied by a white trailer community.
Oak Ridge elementary education before to 1954 was totally segregated; it was legally part of the Anderson County fitness though assembled and directed primarily with federal funds. Black kids could attend only the Scarboro Elementary School.
Oak Ridge High School was closed to black students, who had to be bussed to Knoxville for an education.
It directed until Oak Ridge High School was desegregated in the fall of 1955.
In 1953, the Oak Ridge Town Council encouraged desegregation of Oak Ridge High School; this resulted in an unsuccessful attempt by some inhabitants to recall Waldo Cohn, one of the council.
Board of Education (1954) that segregated enhance schools were unconstitutional, the Oak Ridge officials changed their policy and desegregated the schools.
Oak Ridge provided space at a recently vacated elementary school building (the initial Linden Elementary School) for the education of high school students from Clinton for two years while Clinton High School was being rebuilt.
Robertsville Junior High School, serving the west half of Oak Ridge, was desegregated at the same time as the high school.
Elementary schools in other parts of the town/city and Jefferson Junior High School, serving the east half of the city, were desegregated slowly as black families moved into housing outside of Gamble Valley.
Following the Brown decision, enhance accommodations in Oak Ridge were also integrated, although this took a number of years.
In the early 1960s, Oak Ridge briefly experienced protest picketing against ethnic segregation in enhance accommodations, prominently outside a small-town cafeteria and a laundromat. The "International Friendship Bell" (colloquially, the Peace Bell) at the Oak Ridge Civic Center Two years after World War II ended, Oak Ridge was shifted to civilian control, under the authority of the U.S.
X-10, site of a test graphite reactor, is now the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In 1983, the Department of Energy declassified a report showing that momentous amounts of mercury had been released from the Oak Ridge Reservation into the East Fork Poplar Creek between 1950 and 1977.
A federal court ordered the DOE to bring the Oak Ridge Reservation into compliance with federal and state surroundingal regulations. The Department of Energy runs Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a nuclear and high-tech research establishment at the site, and performs nationwide security work.
Oak Ridge's scientific tradition is explored in the American Museum of Science and Energy.
View from the Oak Ridge Summit, a barren knob on the north slope of Pine Ridge.
East Fork Ridge is on the left, Blackoak Ridge spans the horizon.
Immediately northeast of Oak Ridge, the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast for roughly 6 miles (10 km) toward Solway, where it turns again to the southwest.
This series of bends creates a half-rectangle formation surrounded by water on the northeast, east, and southwest in which Oak Ridge is situated.
The Oak Ridge region is striated by five elongated ridges that run roughly alongside to one another in a northeast-to-southwest direction.
In order from west-to-east, the five ridges are Blackoak Ridge which joins the Elza and K-25 bends of the Clinch and thus "walls off" the half-rectangle East Fork Ridge, Pine Ridge, Chestnut Ridge, and Haw Ridge.
The five ridges are divided by four valleys East Fork Valley (between Blackoak and East Fork Ridge), Gamble Valley (between East Fork Ridge and Pine Ridge), Bear Creek Valley (between Pine Ridge and Chestnut), and Bethel Valley (between Chestnut and Haw).
The chief section of the town/city is positioned in the northeast, where East Fork and Pine Ridge give way to low, scattered hills.
Many of the city's residences are positioned along the mostly steep northeastern slope of Blackoak Ridge.
The culmination of Melton Hill Dam (along the Clinch near Copper Ridge) in 1963 created Melton Hill Lake, which borders the town/city on the northeast and east.
Watts Bar Lake, an impoundment of the Tennessee River which covers the lower 23 miles (37 km) of the Clinch, borders Oak Ridge to the south and southwest.
The Oak Ridge Commemorative Walk at the Civic Center The federal government projects at Oak Ridge are reduced in size and scope, but are still the city's principal economic activeness and one of the biggest employers in the Knoxville urbane area.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the biggest multipurpose lab in the Department of Energy's National Laboratory system.
The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, directed by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, conducts research and education programs for the DOE, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies.
IPIX, Remotec (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman), and a several other technology-based companies have been established in Oak Ridge.
Several radioactive waste refining companies, including Energy - Solutions, have operations in Oak Ridge.
Oak Ridge is now challenged to blend into the suburban orbit of Knoxville as its tradition as a "super secret" government installation subsides.
For example, the Oak Ridge City Center, a shopping center assembled in the 1950s and converted to an indoor shopping mall in the 1980s, is largely empty.
The ORISE building at Oak Ridge Associated Universities In an August 2004 popular vote, town/city voters allowed an increase in small-town sales taxes to fund a $55 million universal for Oak Ridge High School.
Roane State Community College has its biggest branch ground in Oak Ridge.
Other college studies organizations present in the community, but not offering classes locally, include the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and the University of Tennessee Forestry Stations and Arboretum.
Independent schools in the town/city include the Montessori School of Oak Ridge (preschool and kindergarten), St.
The Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning offers a diverse array of educational opportunities for grownups. The Oak Ridge school precinct was ranked number one in the state of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge High School was ranked the number three high school in the state of Tennessee, in the Niche 2017 Best School Districts. Oak Ridge is served by a daily newspaper, The Oak Ridger, and was for many years the home of AM airways broadcast WATO.
A lesser daily journal in the region is The Oak Ridge Observer.
The following are notable citizens who lived in Oak Ridge or were born there: Jeannine Hall Gailey, author who interval up in Oak Ridge, as described in The Robot Scientist's Daughter. Pollard, nuclear physicist and Episcopal priest who was the first director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (now Oak Ridge Associated Universities) and the author of many works on the topic of Christianity and science Ed Westcott, only authorized photographer in Oak Ridge amid the Manhattan Project Children's Museum of Oak Ridge Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge has two sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International: a b "Geographic Identifiers: 2010 Demographic Profile Data (G001): Oak Ridge city, Tennessee".
Olwell, Russell, At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).
Warren Resen, "The Secret City: Oak Ridge, Tennessee," The Observer News, 3 August 2010.
Charles Johnson and Charles Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942 1946 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
See ORNL, Swords to Plowshares: A Short History of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1943 1993); David Ray Smith, John Hendrix and the Y-12 National Security Complex; and D.
Ray Smith, John Hendrix Oak Ridge Prophet, The Oak Ridger, March 15, 2006.
The first written record of the vision is reported to have been in The Oak Ridge Story, by George O.
For Your Information: A Guide to Oak Ridge (United States Engineering Department Community Relations Section, September 1946), p.
Oak Ridge, Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing.
"Mystery Town Cradled Bomb: 75,000 in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
For Your Information: A Guide to Oak Ridge (United States Engineering Department Community Relations Section, September 1946), p.
"Oak Ridge Claims No.
Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning website.
Freeman, Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Oak Ridge.
City of Oak Ridge official website Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau Oak Ridge, Tennessee at DMOZ Historic photos of Oak Ridge amid the Manhattan Project
Categories:
Cities in Tennessee - Oak Ridge, Tennessee - Planned metros/cities in the United States - Populated places established in 1942 - Cities in Anderson County, Tennessee - Cities in Roane County, Tennessee - Manhattan Project - Knoxville urbane region - Company suburbs in Tennessee - 1942 establishments in Tennessee
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