Oak Ridge

Getting to know Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge did not exist before the fall of 1942, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began acquiring roughly 60,000 acres along the Clinch River for the Manhattan Project. Known as the “Secret City,” it sat behind a guarded perimeter fence with seven gates and was left off public maps; the town itself was designed by the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Population swelled from a few thousand to a wartime peak near 75,000 by the summer of 1945 — briefly Tennessee’s fifth-largest city — before falling back as war work wound down. The gates came down on March 19, 1949, and residents voted to incorporate as a self-governing city under a charter adopted May 5, 1959.

Much of the original housing was prefabricated “cemesto” construction — cement-asbestos panel homes built at wartime speed, in graded sizes from A through F — and many still stand today, concentrated in the older east end of town, beside later conventional and new construction.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory grew out of the wartime X-10 Graphite Reactor site and is today the Department of Energy’s largest science and energy national laboratory; the Y-12 National Security Complex sits nearby. The American Museum of Science and Energy serves as the city’s science museum and visitor center, and the Secret City Commemorative Walk — ten bronze interpretive plaques — runs through A.K. Bissell Park. Melton Hill Lake, a TVA reservoir, borders the city, with the paved Melton Lake Greenway and its rowing programs along the shore.

Official local sources — Oak Ridge

Public, official links so you can research the facts yourself — we point at the sources rather than editorializing the data.

• City of Oak Ridge — city services and departments
• Oak Ridge Schools — official district site — its own system, not Anderson County Schools
• Oak Ridge Recreation & Parks — Melton Lake Park, the greenway, and city recreation programs
• Anderson County Government — county services and departments