On this day in 1943 Colonel James C. Marshall, a military engineer, announced that housing would be built for employees of the Clinton Engineer Works who were working on a federal facility in Anderson County, Tennessee. This followed a report that Tennessee Eastman Company of Kingsport, Tennessee, would set up a village on the site, along with a fire department and other necessities for a small town.
The Eastman Corporation, headquartered in Rochester, New York, had agreed to enter into a contract with the War Department to operate “a big government plant” on the land in east Tennessee.
That village went on to become Oak Ridge, and the “big government plant” developed the world’s first working atomic bombs.
(Map of Manhattan Project plants in Tennessee by Arthur S. Hardyman – Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Bomb, p. 48, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37978544)
