March 25th

A milestone on my trip. This morning I entered Tennessee, the first state I had never previously visited. 15 more new states to go.

I knew about the Manhattan project and Los Alamos New Mexico, but at an exhibit a couple of years ago at the National Building Museum in Washington DC I learned about the two other secret cities that were built up from scratch, Hanford Washington (which I will pass by later on in my journey) and Oak Ridge Tennessee. Then I took a class at Brandeis last fall about the Manhattan Project.

Today, I took a 3 hour tour of the Oak Ridge facilities. We saw exhibits in the buildings where uranium was enriched for the bomb on Hiroshima and plutonium was developed for the bomb on Nagasaki.

Two of my pictures below tell the human side of Oak Ridge. The church was used by the 3,000 residents of very small towns that were obliterated to create Oak Ridge. And a woman who came out of high school to work on the machine that stabilized the uranium finally found out over 60 years later that her work led to the bomb.

I walked around the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and visited the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture. Then I ended the day hiking in a nature center along the Tennessee River.

The song of my first day in Tennessee is “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”.