DAILY STAR
In a rural area of Tennessee in 1942 something bizarre happened. The US government began quietly acquiring 60,000 acres of land and quickly built a secret city that would soon house tens of thousands of residents sworn to secrecy about what was going on inside.
Before the Second World War, Oak Ridge, which lies 20 miles west of Knoxville, was merely a vast barren landscape home to around 3,000 people. But on September 19, 1942, that changed when Leslie Groves, the man overseeing the US government’s secret Manhattan Project, decided it was the perfect location to figure out how to create the world’s first atomic bomb.
Originally known as Site X, the area was eventually renamed Clinton Engineer Works before later becoming Oak Ridge. Within the space of three years, the promise of plentiful jobs drew 75,000 people to the city.
But while it featured many of the same amenities as an ordinary American city, including grocery stores, schools and leisure facilities, Oak Ridge was far from ordinary. The city, since dubbed the “secret city” and “atomic city”, couldn’t be found on any maps and the entire place was fenced in, with armed security guarding all entries 24 hours a day.
The thousands of residents displaced by the building of the city weren’t told why they had to move from the area — other than it was something to do with the war effort. Naomi Brummitt, whose mother’s land was forcibly bought up by the government to build Oak Ridge recalled how she was paid just $900 for the 40 acres, WPLN reports.
“We got a form letter in the mail saying that the property had been taken over. We were to leave by December 1942,” she said. Naomi eventually returned to the area for a job at Y-12, the national security complex that separated the uranium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
