Oak Ridge

The town was drawn on a ridge. Planners laid it along the south side of Black Oak Ridge, with Outer Drive at the top and Tennessee Avenue and the Oak Ridge Turnpike running east to west along the bottom, on the northeast corner of a reservation about seventeen miles long and seven wide. Its Black workers lived in hutments to the west, segregated by race and sex, though in 1955 Oak Ridge became one of the first Southern cities to order its schools desegregated.

What the plaque says

Oak Ridge In 1943, Oak Ridge was created as the residential center for the Clinton Engineering Works. Located on the northeast corner of a 59,000-acre reservation acquired by the government in 1942, the community was designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Architects. In 1945, Oak Ridge reached a peak population of 75,000. On January 1, 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission assumed control of the community. In 1959, Oak Ridge became an incorporated municipality.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Museum of Science and Energy — 5.1 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 11 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.
• Frozen Head State Park — 13 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.
• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 14 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.

More markers nearby

• X-10 Plant — 3.7 mi
• The Rose Terrace House — 4.5 mi
• K-25 Plant — 5.1 mi
• Elijah Wood — 6.1 mi