Hanford, a rural area in the Columbia Basin and Benton County in Washington, was once a farming town before the involvement of the United States Government and the Manhattan Project during World War II. Hanford and the neighboring towns were chosen by Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves to be the area that would produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Hanford Engineer Works (later known as the Hanford site) was born in March 1943 with the government contracting the DuPont Corporation along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Before construction could begin the government had to relocate the local residents, evicting 1,500 people from their homes, taking sacred fishing grounds of the local Native tribe Wanapum, disinterring 177 bodies from the White Bluffs cemetery, and relocating the bodies to Prosser. The displaced residents either moved away or stayed to work on the project. The residents, mostly farmers, were given 30 days to evacuate and were compensated for their homes and businesses. The government also bought the neighboring towns of Richland to house the white workers and the town of Pasco to house the black and ethnic workers.
The Hanford Construction Camp provided temporary housing to house the builders and their families while building the facility and new Richland that would house the site’s employees. The government contracted Gustav Albin Pehrson, a Swedish-born architect from Spokane to see that Richland was made into a town for the arriving 16,000 employees and their families. Construction took 18 months, assisted by Pehrson’s assembly line style of prefabrication techniques. The cookie cutter houses he had created were called “letter houses,” “ABC houses,” or “alphabet houses” due to Pehrson assigning each style of house a letter of the alphabet. Many of these houses are still standing to this day.
Once construction was completed in 1944, Hanford began creating the plutonium. Due to the secrecy of the project the workers had no idea what they were making until they learned of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan. They soon realized what they had helped create at Hanford and embraced their contribution, with their new city slogan, "Richland: The Atom-Bustin' Village of the West." After the war, the military turned over control of the site to General Electric and the nuclear program to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The town of Richland was bought back by the residents from the government on July 15, 1958, becoming the eleventh largest town in the state. During the Cold War, Hanford was again producing weapons-grade plutonium, and the AEC was commissioned to research, develop, produce, and regulate nuclear power, which has led to a multitude of health and environmental consequences that are still being dealt with today.
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