The Atomic Heritage Foundation is developing a Heritage Tourism Master Plan to protect and preserve critical World War II heritage tourism sites in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In conjunction with the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau, AHF intends to rebuild, preserve or upgrade several important Manhattan Project reactors so that visitors may view an integral part of our nation's history. In addition to scientific site preservation, several Oak Ridge city sites would factor into this heritage tourism plan.
Among them:
Alexander Inn The inn where General Leslie Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and other prominent Manhattan Project participants stayed. Tentatively, this could be restored as a hotel and restaurant.
Jackson Square The major commercial area of the Oak Ridge reservation.
Chapel on the Hill A white frame church on top of a knoll near Jackson Square that hosted interdenominational congregations during the war.
Additionally, opportunities for the Atomic Heritage Foundation and heritage tourism in the Los Alamos, New Mexico and Richland, Washington areas may present themselves in the future.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation
910 17th Street, NW
Suite 408
Washington, DC 20006
202-293-0045 info@atomicheritage.org
Atomic Story of the Week
I went to Chicago with another man, a chemist, and the two of us found our way to the University of Chicago and to the Metallurgical Laboratory, which everybody called the Met Lab. We showed our credentials and we got taken to an office where there was a Dupont representative named Dr. Walter Dew. And he sat the two of us down and he said, “Have you made any guesses as to what this is all about?” And of course we’d been doing a lot of guessing but we said “No.” He said “Well, it’s about atomic energy. We are going to use atomic energy to make a bomb.”
He opened a drawer and he pulled out a couple little cubes of metal and threw them on the table and said, “Do you know what this is?” I picked one of them up and it felt very heavy so I said “Oh, I don’t know. It’s very dense.” He said, “Well, that’s uranium. We’re going to make a pile with uranium and graphite, and in this pile we’re going to make a new element called plutonium, and with this plutonium we’re going to make a bomb. Our part of it is to make the plutonium and other people are going to make the bomb. One way to think of it is that you would have people like slices of an orange and all these orange slices would go together and make a bomb.”
HARRY KAMACK, HANFORD
Did You Know?
"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them." (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director, Manhattan Project)
