The Girls of Atomic City Read Online Free PDF Page B

pride in the rapid strides made in establishing and improving Oak Ridge.
    —Oak Ridge Journal, September 4, 1943
    Toni Peters had no doubt that something big was going on over there near the Black Oak Ridge, and today she was finally going to find out just what it was.
    Sure as the day is long, she—and everybody else in her hometown of Clinton, Tennessee—knew that whatever was being built along the Clinch River was not your run-of-the-mill wartime factory.
    No, sir, not with the nonstop comings and goings. This was not the refurbishing of a cannery to make airplane parts or an assembly line pumping out shell casings. No one seemed to know what was going on, not even the people already working there. Lines of packed train cars snaked through the land and convoys of overloaded trucks headed into that strange new Reservation. But nothing ever seemed to come out: no tanks, no munitions, no jeeps. The perpetual rumble and hum of transport and construction seemed to carry on the wind,landing in Clinton’s ears, teasing those who lived there with its incessant song of mysterious progress.
    During the past year, Toni’s senior year of high school, work seemed to shift into high gear, and chatter about the war project just 10 miles down the road followed suit. The class of 1943, Toni among them, hoped there might still be jobs available after graduation. The people of Clinton were right next door to something of a size and scale that their little corner of the state had never seen.
    Everything’s goin’ in and nothin’s comin’ out. . . .
    That was the talk around town, from the drugstore to the hosiery factory. That, and talk of jobs. But that was just talk. Today was Toni’s birthday. She was going to find out for herself what was going on behind those fences.
    Toni’s family had learned early on about the new development in their corner of East Tennessee. Aunt Lillie, her mama’s sister, had found out firsthand. Whatever the government was building was far too grand to squeeze in between the existing lives and lands already carved into this corner of Southern Appalachia, and Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley’s peach farm in the community of Wheat was smack dab in the line of bureaucratic wartime fire.
    The Army Corps of Engineers had been scouting the land since that past spring. They began surveying in earnest, walking property lines, and trying to make sense of boundaries that had lasted centuries but had never needed to be stated. The Project found the region appealing for a number of reasons. The Southern and the Louisville & Nashville railroads conveniently tracked along the northern reaches of the 83,000 acres that the Project was initially eyeing. The land backed up to an elevated crest called the Black Oak Ridge. The site skirted past the towns of Oliver Springs and Kingston, Harriman, and Clinton. Smaller established communities such as Wheat, Elza, Robertsville, and Scarboro were in an area that offered a lot of land at little cost. It was generally secluded, far enough from the coasts to avoid an easy attack, but easily reached by New York, Washington, and Chicago. The plants would fit snugly into the valleys between the ridges. And the Smokies stood starkly to the east like an ancient wallof secrecy, a towering guard all its own. The mild climate was a fit as well. Plants needed to be constructed at blistering speed, requiring as close to year-round work as possible. Finally, the Norris Dam and the bottled-up energy of the Clinch River could provide a tremendous supply of electricity—the kind that was particularly suited to a colossal military reservation like Site X.
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    Surveyors. They had been East Tennessee’s harbingers of doom for at least the last two decades, longer than that if you were Cherokee. At the first sighting of a tripod or transit, alarm bells should have sounded. The last time surveyors had taken to walking the back roads of Anderson and Campbell Counties, back in the early