DEL.ICIO.USFor the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/12/05
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — "A man told me, 'They have the smartest people in the world out there in Oak Ridge, but there's not a one of them who knows what it is that they're doing.' "
That's a comment by Dr. Lewis Preston, an Army first lieutenant who chose to go to Oak Ridge to work on the Manhattan Project during World War II rather than go overseas and still lives in the city, quoted in "Cooking Behind the Fence: Recipes and Recollections from the Oak Ridge '43 Club."
 Oak Ridge Convention & Visitors Bureau | |||
| The American Museum of Science and Energy explores Oak Ridge's role in World War II. The once-secret town's participation in the Manhattan Project helped end the war. | |||
 Oak Ridge Convention & Visitors Bureau | |||
| The Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tenn., which includes a gristmill, is considered to be the most authentic and complete replica of pioneer Appalachian life in the country. | |||
 Oak Ridge Convention & Visitors Bureau | |||
| Visitors view a model of the atom at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Lighter offerings for kids can be found at the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge. | |||
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MOST POPULAROne of Tennessee's best-kept secrets is the aptly nicknamed "Secret City," marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II with its Secret City Festival next weekend.
This town sprang up seemingly overnight in 1942 on a 60,000-acre tract, beneath the cloak of government classification around the nation's efforts to develop the first atomic weapons. It would grow into the fifth-largest city in Tennessee.
In another remembrance in "Cooking Behind the Fence," Sue Wassom Thomas, a student when she arrived in Oak Ridge with her family, noted just how fast the town grew: "There were only three flattops [quickly constructed housing for workers and their families] on our street when I left for school one morning. When I came home from school that afternoon, there was a whole new neighborhood of flattops — finished, furnished and occupied."
This once-secret city, with its natural, historic and family attractions, shopping and local restaurant favorites like the Soup Kitchen, Golden Girls ("Yes, we have our own Blanche!") and Big Ed's Pizza, a boisterous dig-in-with-your-hands hangout, now proclaims its presence from the top of its International Friendship Bell. The Friendship Bell is the first monument between a U.S. Manhattan Project city and Japan, and it serves as an expression of hope for everlasting peace.
Museums abound, beginning with the American Museum of Science and Energy, where you'll discover how 75,000 people kept mum about a national secret. The museum interprets Oak Ridge's role in World War II through exhibits that include "Cold War/Civil Defense," "Real Robots," a vortex simulator, and a science and technology careers workstation. You'll also see a re-creation of a 1940s Victory Garden complete with white picket fence enclosure — just like those that produced 40 percent of the vegetables consumed by Americans in World War II.
At the Historic Graphite Reactor, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and a part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (formerly X-10), visitors will see the world's oldest nuclear reactor, built during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.
"I wasn't sure how a light bulb worked when I got here," recalls Graydon "Grady" Whitman, who arrived in Oak Ridge in March 1944 at the age of 23 to work at the Y-12 National Security Complex. Whitman, who now volunteers as an interpreter with the Oak Ridge Visitor Center, says, "I was flung into one of the control rooms and told to manage it. I grew up very quickly."
In nearby Lake City, visitors can tour the Coal Miners Museum to see the artifacts of the Coal Creek War of 1891-1892 — fought between the free miners and the Tennessee militia and convict laborers. The museum is small, but it packs a big punch with its exhibit on the Fraterville Mine Disaster of May 19, 1902, which killed 184. Some of the miners (35 of whom are buried in the cemetery nearby) left messages to their loved ones as they lay dying in the mine, including Jacob Vowell, who wrote: ". . . bury me and Elbert [his 14-year-old son] in the same grave . . . We are together."
On a light note, the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge offers a whole school of fun with 12 interactive exhibit areas that intertwine the arts, history, science and the environment in nontraditional exhibit galleries. Within the 54,000 square feet of this original Manhattan Project schoolhouse, children can dig coal in an Appalachian mine, shoot boats down the waterways through the locks and stop to smell the bromeliads in the rain forest.
Dolls from all over the world are displayed throughout the museum: colorful souvenir dolls from Brazil, Native American dolls in traditional dress, life-size puppets and others.
In International Hall, the smooth wooden Japanese Kokeshi dolls, an 80-piece collection donated to the museum by the Smithsonian Institution in 1974, are handle-with-care items. In the Doll House room, two fun collections hark back to earlier times with "Your Grandma's Dolls" and "Your Great-Grandma's Dolls."
The big attraction here is a trim two-story pink house that children as tall as 5 feet can comfortably enter. Big squashy chairs invite kids to come sit a spell, and no one can resist peeking into the refrigerator or climbing the stairs to the second floor.
More kid (and adult) fun rolls out at the open-air Museum of Appalachia, a living mountain village in nearby Norris, with original log structures, museum and Hall of Fame. Sitting in rustic splendor on 65 forested acres populated by guinea hens and assorted other fowl, the museum is considered to be the most authentic and complete replica of pioneer Appalachian life in the country.
At Granny's Hen House and Chicken Lot, where the turkeys and peafowl roam freely, one expects Granny to appear, basket tucked in the crook of her arm, to gather up the morning eggs.
At the early 19th-century Mark Twain's Family Cabin, moved from 'Possum Trot, Tenn., one imagines the writer's parents and older siblings swapping tall tales around the supper table. All told, there are 39 structures on the bucolic perimeter of the grassy courtyard, including the pièce de résistance: a privy. It's a "two-holer" — now one of the rarest structures in America.
Besides the requisite log chapel, gristmill, smokehouse, loom house and assorted other buildings typical of a pioneering community, there are the Barn Museum and the Appalachian Hall of Fame, both of which are filled with the "pioneer, cultural, antique and everyday items from interesting and colorful mountain folk" — including Col. Cooper's 1910 glass eye and "Uncle Henry's Peg Leg."
Nearby, on the grounds of Norris Dam State Park, is the Lenoir Museum Cultural Complex. This tidy museum houses early American displays of thousands of items collected over 60 years by Will G. Lenoir, among them an 18th-century gristmill, a barrel organ "music box" with 125 pipes and 45 moving carved wooden figures and a collection of kitchen implements from an early 19th-century homestead.
A century later, homesteads not nearly as rustic but just as sturdy and utilitarian would spring up in Oak Ridge. Although these "cemestos," constructed of a mix of cement and asbestos during the Manhattan Project, were supposed to last only seven years, many of them are still lived in today.
"I recall the feel of the house, the newness, the warmth of body and spirit," recalls Katherine Bolling, who arrived in Oak Ridge with her husband and young daughter on a cold, snowy day in 1941, in "Cooking Behind the Fence." "I could sense that coming to Oak Ridge had been a good decision."
Visitors will likewise feel good about coming to this historic once-secret city.
