The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

by Denise Kiernan

  Toni was about nine years old the first time she ever lay eyes on the dam, a favorite family destination. Benjamin Peters, a local printer, loved herding his children into the car to seek out nearby adventure. Sandwiches were packed, and Toni, Rooie, Tincy, Silver Buckles, and Dopey—nicknames only for the Peters children—would sit and gaze at the massive machinery, unearthed clay, and seemingly tamed river, the dam feeling much like a bit on a horse just waiting to bolt. Countless bodies streamed efficiently like fire ants along a freshly poured concrete hill. She could still hear her father’s favorite call to arms:

  “Honey, get the kids! We’re going to that dam site!”

  The dam’s construction and the resulting flooding called for the relocation of living and dead alike: nearly 3,000 families and 5,000 graves had to be relocated. And for some, the arrival of Norris Dam was not the first time land had been taken from them, with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park having already moved some residents from their ancestors’ lands years earlier. And the water, once released from Norris Lake, was much too cool for mussels accustomed to more tepid and shallower waters. They slowly began to die out, taking their pearls with them. Clinch River pearls began to pass into memory, after making it as far as the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they lent a touch of Appalachian glitter to the “City of Light.”

  But the Smokies and the Norris and the end of the pearling industry were merely setting the stage for this, yet another uprooting of life, another rerouting of history.

  Around October of 1942, after surveyors weighed acreage, homes, and outbuildings, reducing lives and livelihoods to a statistical formula, the notifications came. Declarations of Taking. Notices of Condemnation. Requests to Vacate. News came in varying forms, no one any easier to digest than another. Always there was the feeling of being sucker-punched, leaving you breathless, doubled over, gasping for options. In some cases children were sent home from school to deliver the bad news: The government said they had to find a new place to live. Other families came home from work or back from the fields to find the notices tacked up to their doors or trees, stating abruptly that the land belonged to the United States of America and was going to be used to establish something called the Kingston Demolition Range. Other families received the gut-wrenching news via mail or messenger—a knock at the door jarring them from the already taxing daily reality of raising food and children. The name “Kingston Demolition Range” was itself a form of motivation. One woman reported being told that staying in her home would be risky, as they might well be dropping bombs in the area.

  The amount of time given to families to vacate their homes ranged widely. The lucky ones got as much as six weeks, maybe more. Others had to be packed up in two or three weeks. Parlee Raby of Oliver Springs received this notice from the Land Acquisition Section of the Corps of Engineers for the Kingston Demolition Range, dated November 11, 1942:

  The War Department intends to take possession of your farm December 1, 1942. It will be necessary for you to move, not later than that date.

  In order to pay you quickly, the money for your property will be placed into the United States Court at Knoxville, Tennessee.

  The Court will permit you to withdraw a substantial part of this money without waiting. This may be done without imparing [sic] your right to contest the value fixed on your property by the War Department.

  It is expected that your money will be put in court within ten days, and as soon as you are notified, it is suggested you get in touch with the United States Attorney to find how much can be drawn.

  Your fullest co-operation will be a material aid to the War Effort.

  Very truly yours,

  Fred Morgan

  Project Manager

  After the notifications came the negotiators from the Corps of Engineers Land Acquisition Section, who set property prices based on the earlier assessments. Reimbursements were hardly fair from a strict land-value point of view, even less so if stress and strain were taken into consideration. The shock and loss of individual homes was difficult enough, especially for residents getting on in years, but this was the loss of schools, churches, family farms, shops, and long-traveled stretches of familiar road. The Taking encompassed large tracts of land and small farms, ramshackle hovels, and expansive homesteads, hills with memories, crops, and orchards. A man named Van Gilder lost 1,000 acres. The Brummitt family was promised $900 for 40 acres and did not receive all of it. The Irwin family was offered $10,500 for their Gamble Valley farm, which included a large antebellum home, a five-room framed house, two tenant houses, barns, outbuildings, crops, and equipment. The amount offered could not buy half of what was “bought” from them. Entire communities and the ways of life that infused them were to be wiped away in a matter of weeks. For some residents of East Tennessee, this was the third time they were evicted from their lands—both the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Norris Dam having already claimed their share years earlier.

  To estimate those displaced, the number of parcels was multiplied by average family size, give or take a few. There were in the neighborhood of 800 parcels, putting the estimation at around 1,000 families and 3,000 people.

  But the real number of the displaced may have been much higher. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers living in outbuildings and on the lands of others didn’t figure prominently into the calculations, making it harder to estimate the true number of displaced residents. They were to be as overlooked and undervalued as the land itself and the history that infused it for centuries.

  The majority of evicted families accepted the terms offered them on the spot. Officials had strongly suggested that each additional day that they held out reduced the chance that they would see any money at all. There were those who protested and organized meetings, and some even saw the amounts paid them by the government increased a bit. But they had to move all the same.

  It was not that they didn’t support the war effort. These were patriotic people, some of whom could trace their families back to the founding of the United States, whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. Some were Scots-Irish and Dutch who had made their way south seeking better climate and more arable lands. They had survived the Great Depression. Maybe just barely, but they had survived it. War was a time of sacrifice for all. But their country was asking more of them than just some rusty coffeepots for a scrap-metal drive. It was asking for their homes, their lands, and their livelihoods. It wasn’t just the structures, but the sum of all the work, love, and life they’d known. They would have to hand over secret hiding places passed down among children, onetime saplings that now towered over their homes, dozens of cemeteries in churches and backyards commemorating lives past, children lost to fever, men lost to other wars in other times.

  It was even harder for those who had, from a strictly monetary point of view, “less” to lose. Many had no cars or trucks to move what meager possessions they had. Some owned one pair of shoes, others none at all. The government offered no money to move, and if residents used the money they were going to receive for their homes, what would they live off? How could they eat? This wasn’t industrial-scale big tobacco or cotton farming. This was subsistence, put-food-on-the-table farming. These people weren’t asking for anything much; they only wanted to feed their kids, work their land, and then one day be buried beneath it alongside their spouses, parents, and grandparents.

  As the Taking continued through the end of 1942 and into 1943, the 83,000 acres that the Land Acquisition Section had originally scouted for Site X was, in the end, closer to 56,000 acres or about 92 square miles, stretching roughly 17 miles long and averaging 7 miles wide. That number would eventually swell to approximately 59,000 acres, growing out of the Cumberland Foothills, punctuated by ridges like the Pine and the Chestnut. The Site was cradled on three sides by the Clinch River. Roughly 180 structures were spared, and were put to various uses before, during, and after the completion of Site X, from housing to storage.

  Toni’s aunt Lil
lie and uncle Wiley lost their home and peach orchard. Nearby Roane County had been the peach capital of the United States in the 1920s and into the ’30s, until severe cold destroyed the crops almost irreparably. But that little peach orchard meant something deep and real to Toni and her entire extended family beyond property and income. The orchard meant summer to Toni—the smell, the taste, the fuzzy, sticky feel of high summer. It meant standing alongside her brothers and sisters, a roadside crew, helping Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley pick the juicy golden fruits. You wanted to get them just right. You couldn’t pick them too late and too soft, because you wanted them to last, to keep their shape and flavor in the heat of the sun and to stay perky and firm enough for pie. But you didn’t want to pick them too soon and too hard, either. You had to let the sugars develop, let the flesh of the fruit yield just enough to unleash a syrupy-sweet-tangy trickle from the first juicy bite, sending the success of a season’s worth of sun and rain flowing down your chin.

  The gang of Peters children would pluck them, eat them, can them, and often sell them. After picking, Toni and Dopey would sort the peaches according to quality and line the sorted bushels along a small stretch of Clinton Highway. Their handmade sign advertised their offerings: one dollar a bushel for “good” peaches, 75 cents a bushel for “not quite as nice,” 50 cents for “poor” peaches, and finally, at the bottom of the bushel, downright “bad” peaches offered to passersby for 25 cents a bushel. But even the bad ones were still worth snagging; they were fine for a batch of peach butter. Those summer morning breakfasts were filled with sliced peaches soaking in sugar and milk.

  These sweltering ambrosial mornings were a gift offered up freely by a land that had long responded in fruit and grain to the care Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley gave. But no more. Toni’s aunt Lillie and uncle Wiley moved to a nearby farm to stay with relatives and figure things out. They were lucky to have their people nearby. For Toni, the peachy days of high summer were gone.

  ★ ★ ★

  They say the Prophet had seen it coming.

  A popular story goes that an old man of the mountains by the name of John Hendrix had had visions before, but this one was bigger, more elaborate. He was around 50 at the time and had come from the woods near his home in the vicinity of Scarboro and Robertsville, where he had slept forty nights on the forest floor—as a voice had instructed him to do. When he finally emerged from the woods, he shared his vision with anyone who would listen.

  “Bear Creek Valley some day will be filled with great buildings and factories and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be,” he said to those gathered at the local store, where he often shared his visions. Most just humored him. This one was so rich in detail, though. The life-worn man of the earth went on to talk of a city built on Black Oak Ridge, of railroad spurs, and of countless people and machines.

  “I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s coming . . .”

  John Hendrix died in 1903. Now almost 40 years later, few had seen it coming.

  Construction began on Site X in late 1942, the detritus of rapidly uprooted lives still scattered over the ground, reminders of what was. Fences of abandoned farms lay tangled and splintered; cattle roamed free, disoriented. Construction workers and scavengers made their way through vacated lands, finding books, photos, shoes, pans, tools, and more lying abandoned in the dust. Sacrificed memories, casualties of the war.

  Prices on available land—now a scarcer and more valuable commodity—took off for the rafters, inflating beyond most folks’ fiscal grasp. The evicted had to compete with new workers arriving to the area in droves, drawn from other regions in the South by news of upcoming construction jobs at this big, new site. So many locals soon found themselves applying for work at the project that had evicted them in the first place. Reduced to renters and wage earners, these displaced people would work at Site X, on lands they once held as their own.

  In August 1943, long after construction had begun and as people like Celia began making their way to the Reservation, a House Military Affairs subcommittee held an open investigative committee to address ongoing complaints of the dispossessed who felt they were not fairly compensated for their property. Congressman John Jennings Jr. was in attendance as locals stated their cases, often loudly, their dusty faces streaked with tears. But there was little to be done. The governor himself, Prentice Cooper, was not informed about the Project until 1943, after land had been acquired, razed, and reshaped for what was to come.

  By fall of 1943, three plants, code-named Y-12, X-10, and K-25, were under way and thousands of construction workers were laying foundations and erecting colossal structures at what was now called the Clinton Engineer Works. Toni’s family had been lucky, all things considered. Tinier communities had been all but erased from the landscape. Downtown Clinton remained intact. No one had taken Toni’s home. Kids were still playing Red Rover, joyriding in borrowed cars, and sneaking around for a puff or two of some rabbit tobacco. The Five and Ten Cent Store where Toni worked summers making $1.42 a day and spending 25 cents of that on a hamburger at lunch remained a place to enjoy a gossip or a dance in front of the jukebox. Hoskins Drug Store was busier than ever, and the Clinton Theater, where she had delighted in seeing every Laurel and Hardy film she possibly could, was still taking tickets. The pearl hunters might have been gone, but Market Street cut a fine figure through town and was home to whoever had something to sell.

  Toni knew there was no money for college, so she never bothered asking. Mama always said once school was finished, it was time for kids to start paying rent. After graduating in spring 1943, Toni had taken the job at a local law office and stayed with her sister Tincy, who had eloped with the love of her life. It was a house of drinking, laughing, smoking, and ceaseless carrying-on. But no matter what kind of nonsense transpired, or what wet roadhouse in their dry county Tincy and the gang returned from, late night carousing always ended in a stop by Toni’s room. Toni would wake to the sound of doors and giggles, shadows in the hall, a warm hug from her sister, and a hot Crystal’s hamburger in a grease-stained paper bag.

  But Toni was ready for something new. Her personality had gotten her as far as her smarts. Her shoulder-length waves framed a face perpetually highlighted by an impish grin. Her father had taught her that excitement could be found just around the bend. “Man decides to hold his own funeral before he dies . . . ,” her father once read in the paper. “Kids! Get in the car!” Off they went to a stranger’s “living” wake. Now it was Toni’s turn to seek adventure. She was going to join the girls who had gone to look for jobs at that big site down the road.

  Toni could not help but be influenced by the new expectations of the young women of the time. This was the era of Rosie the Riveter, when a song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb gave voice to more than one million women who had already joined the workforce, bandanas in their hair, grease on their smocks. Then artist J. Howard Miller, commissioned by Westinghouse to create a series of posters, gave Rosie a face after seeing a photo of Geraldine Hoff, a 17-year-old Lansing, Michigan, cellist-cum-factory worker. Miller’s poster caught the eye of artist Norman Rockwell, and his take on the war’s working woman graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943, forever linking Rosie’s name to the image inspired by Geraldine. Clad in denim coveralls, an American flag waving behind her, the woman sits, sandwich in hand, a riveting gun and lunch pail inscribed with “Rosie” in her lap. Goggles and a welder’s shield frame her proudly smudged face as a copy of Mein Kampf ably props up her tired feet.

  Rockwell famously painted the world not as it was but as he would have liked it to be, he said. His was a more comforting vision of a world in conflict, a vision that focused on determination and stick-to-it-iveness, on family and home, even as that home, that way of life, felt threatened.

  Rockwell’s vision would be echoed more locally in the images of a young, unknown photographer who had been hired to document Site X for the Project from the very beginning
of things, as ground broke and fences grew. Twenty-one-year-old James Edward “Ed” Westcott was tall and thin, pressed shirts hanging off his wiry frame. Hair parted deep on one side fell in a slick swoop along his put-you-at-ease face, a camera permanently suspended from his long, thin neck. Given unlimited access, he spent his days prowling every inch of Site X and the lives of the people who were moving there to make it home. His lens captured the grand and seemingly mundane, the towering edifices under construction, the somber and smiling faces of the displaced seeking work. As the Reservation grew and the newcomers settled in, he would portray Site X as the Project envisioned it, and as those who traveled there wanted it to be. He snapped the rising town’s pioneering spirit and the expressions of a newfound camaraderie among those for whom family and home were far away. Maybe here life could be the way everyone would like it to be, a view of prosperity and hope, of digging in and smiling down any adversity, a sentiment shared by many who survive the most difficult of times.

  Bad peaches can always make peach butter.

  Today was Toni’s 18th birthday. She was old enough to go and do and be whoever she wanted. She was heading down the road, straight through those armed gates, past that barbed-wire fence and right into that place she had heard so much about. Adventure could be right around the corner.

  She was going to that damn Site.

  TUBEALLOY

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  IDA AND THE ATOM, 1934

  A brilliant 38-year-old German geochemist named Ida Noddack had read Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s paper “Possible Production of Elements of Atomic Number Higher than 92,” in Nature, with great interest, as had the rest of the international scientific community in 1934.