Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about 25 miles (40 km) west of downtown Knoxville.

[1] In 1942,[12] the United States federal government forcibly purchased nearly 60,000 acres (240 km2) of farmland in the Clinch River valley for the development of a planned city supporting 75,000 residents.

[13] Oak Ridge was established in 1942 as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the massive American, British, and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb.

The Oak Ridge area was largely uninhabited when Euro-American explorers and settlers arrived in the late 18th century, although the Cherokee claimed the land as part of their hunting grounds.

The European-American settlers who founded these communities arrived in the late 1790s after the American Revolutionary War and after the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Holston, ceding what is now Anderson County to the United States.

During the early 19th century, several rural farming communities developed in the Oak Ridge area, namely Edgemoor and Elza in the northeast, East Fork and Wheat in the southwest, Robertsville in the west, and Bethel and Scarboro in the southeast.

A popular legend holds that John Hendrix (1865-1915), a largely unknown local man, predicted the creation of the city of Oak Ridge around 40 years before construction on the project began.

Following the death of his youngest daughter, Ethel, to diphtheria, and the subsequent departure of his wife and three remaining children, Hendrix began hearing voices in his head.

As the story is told, following these 40 days spent in rugged isolation, Hendrix began seeing visions of the future, and he sought to spread his prophetic message to any who would listen.

[19] According to published accounts,[20] one vision that he described repeatedly was a description of the city and production facilities built 28 years after his death, during World War II.

The version recalled by neighbors and relatives reported: In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder.

The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for 40 nights and I would be shown visions of what the future holds for this land.... And I tell you, Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be.

And there will be a city on Black Oak Ridge and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's Place.

Its relatively low population made acquisition affordable, yet the area was accessible by highway and rail, and utilities such as water and electricity were readily available with the recent completion of Norris Dam.

This feature was linear and partitioned by several ridges, providing natural protection against the spread of disasters at the four major industrial plants—so the plants would not blow up "like firecrackers on a string".

[29] House and dormitory accommodations to support construction workers contracted to build the Clinton Engineer Works (CEW) in Oak Ridge were basic, consisting of trailers, barracks, and many "hutments" — pre-fabricated five-person huts heated by a central coal-powered furnace.

A library with 9,400 books, a symphony orchestra, sporting facilities, church services for 17 denominations, and a Fuller Brush Company salesman served the new city and its 75,000 residents.

Oak Ridge was developed by the federal government as a segregated community, required by the Southern bloc of Democrats in Congress to authorize funding for the project.

Due to generally holding lower-ranked jobs, their assigned dwellings were predominantly government-built "hutments" (one-room shacks) located very close to the Y-12 plant, in the one residential area designated as colored.

After the war, all hutments were dismantled, and a colored neighborhood of permanent houses was developed in the Gamble Valley area of Oak Ridge, which during wartime had been occupied by a white trailer community.

Oak Ridge elementary education prior to 1954 was segregated; it was legally part of the Anderson County system though built and operated primarily with federal funds.

[43] In the early 1960s, Oak Ridge briefly experienced protest picketing against racial segregation in public accommodations, notably outside a local cafeteria and a laundromat.

[44] Two years after World War II ended, Oak Ridge was shifted to civilian control, under the authority of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Two of the four major plants created for the wartime bomb production remain in use today: In 1983, the DOE declassified a report showing that significant amounts of mercury had been released from the Oak Ridge Reservation into the East Fork Poplar Creek between 1950 and 1977.

[46] In addition, the Oak Ridge Reservation was put on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priorities List as a Superfund site.

It is home to the Spallation Neutron Source, a $1.4 billion project completed in 2006, and "Titan", one of the world's most powerful scientific supercomputers, which has peak performance of more than one quadrillion operations per second.

[47] The federal government projects at Oak Ridge are reduced in size and scope, but are still the city's principal economic activity and one of the largest employers in the Knoxville metropolitan area.

Several federal prime contractors fulfill different roles on the Oak Ridge Reservation, including Consolidated Nuclear Security, UCOR (an Amentum-led company), and UT–Battelle.

[52][53] Immediately northeast of Oak Ridge, the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast for roughly 6 miles (10 km) toward Solway, where it turns again to the southwest.

Watts Bar Lake, an impoundment of the Tennessee River which covers the lower 23 miles (37 km) of the Clinch, borders Oak Ridge to the south and southwest.