Oak Ridge – Secret City

In November 1942, Army Engineers were ordered to build a town for 13,000 people, and a year later the target grew to 42,000 while the actual population reached 75,000 in September 1945, almost three times the city’s 2005 population. Shown on no maps and known through the war as Clinton Engineer Works rather than Oak Ridge, it was a secret city. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill of Chicago produced a design with neighborhood schools linked by winding streets along Black Oak Ridge. In 1943 Captain P.E. O’Meara became the first town manager, but as the population surged that fall, the Army brought in Turner Construction of New York to manage city operations. The Roane-Anderson Company established by Turner became the landlord and eventually rented and maintained more than 35,000 housing units. It also managed 17 eating places serving 40,000 meals a day, a 500-person housekeeper service, the Guest House hotel, a laundry, garbage pick-up, coal delivery, a bus service carrying up to 120,000 riders a day, a railroad with five locomotives, a chicken farm, and a 3,000-cattle farm. Roane-Anderson also brought in 200 businesses and shops for residents. With wartime shortages affecting everything, the company’s 10,000 employees handled an unpopular job very well. Its Recreational and Welfare Association, assisted by a council of 14 citizens, improved life for residents by sponsoring 17 sports, four recreation halls, two community centers, eight playgrounds, and by 1945 meeting places for about 75 clubs and societies, as well as 22 churches.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee · United States