ORCVB releases heritage tour guide

The Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau has released a new 35-page, pocket-sized printed tour guide about the Secret City. The guide contains a detailed driving tour of heritage sites within the community, along with numerous facts and historic photographs of Oak Ridge from the WWII era. The guide also includes various other information about the city’s tourism attractions and hotels.

“Oak Ridge played such a pivotal role in world affairs. People visit our Welcome Center and want to know what to see and visit. The tour guide will give them a better understanding of the historic WWII sites within our city and an introduction to our attractions and hotels that they can take with them,” said Katy Brown, ORCVB president. “We are very excited to provide this guide for our visitors.”

Martin McBride, founder of TheSecretCityStore.com, wrote the Oak Ridge Heritage Tour Guide, with the assistance of many longtime Oak Ridge residents. The publication costs $4 and can be purchased at the ORCVB Welcome Center Gift Shop, the American Museum of Science and Energy, the Children’s Museum and Jefferson Compounding Center. It is also available online at www.SecretCityStore.com.

The tour guide gives visitors an inside look at the story of how Oak Ridge became the largest of three secret cities created by the Army Corps of Engineers during WWII as part of the Manhattan Project. The goal of this project was to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Oak Ridge served as the headquarters of the project and more than 100,000 workers came to the Secret City during this time to build and operate three large nuclear facilities in the city. The workers’ principal task was to separate a rare form of uranium (called uranium-235) from naturally occurring uranium on a large scale, in time to help end the war.

Both the Secret City of Oak Ridge and its nuclear plants were operated in total secrecy throughout the war. No one was allowed to talk about what was being done. Even birth and death notices were prohibited from being printed in the local newspaper to prevent America’s opponents from gaining insight into the scale of its top-secret work.

The city went from zero population to 75,000 in two-and-a-half years. It built one of the nation’s largest bus systems to serve the skyrocketing population. Only half of the city’s residents lived in permanent housing. The rest lived in dorms, trailers, temporary plywood-structures (called hutments) and barracks. Many of the world’s leading scientific experts thought the task impossible, but the people of East Tennessee accomplished it.

“What early Oak Ridge workers accomplished in such a short period of time is simply incredible,” said David Bradshaw, president of the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association. “The new guide is a welcome addition to our efforts to preserve this priceless heritage. I recommend it to anyone interested in this amazing aspect of World War II.”

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with their 300,000 deaths) remains in the world consciousness. However, the memories of the staggering non-nuclear death toll from World War II, over a hundred times larger at 50 to 70 million deaths, has largely faded. It’s the legacy of the Manhattan Project that year after year pushes mankind back from the brink of another deadly World War. In a few years, mankind will acknowledge a century without a deadly World War Three, an amazing achievement since only two decades separated the first and second world wars.

“The Manhattan Project brought World War II to an end and fundamentally changed the course of world history,” said Tennessee Rep. and retired Air Force fighter pilot John Ragan. “I hope people will visit Oak Ridge and learn about the remarkable things that happened here. It’s a fascinating story.”

For more information about the tour guide and visiting the Secret City, contact the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau at (800) 887-3429 or online at www.oakridgevisitor.com. The ORCVB is a local organization formed to strengthen the area economy through the marketing and promotion of Oak Ridge as a destination for meetings, business, and leisure travel.