American Museum of Science and Energy

Oak Ridge did not exist in 1942. That September the War Department authorized buying about 56,000 acres of East Tennessee ridge country for the Manhattan Project, and more than 1,000 families on farms and in the hamlets of Elza, Robertsville and Scarboro were told to leave, some with only two weeks' notice. Notices were sometimes nailed to doors or trees, and some of the families had already been moved once for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or Norris Dam.

The town was segregated. Black workers could live only in Gamble Valley, in government-built plywood hutments sixteen feet square, with shuttered windows and one oil stove for four to six people, and a single bathhouse for every twelve. Women lived in a fenced section with a 10 p.m. curfew. The only family housing was two hutments joined by a shed, with no electricity or running water. Nothing of Gamble Valley survives, and the National Park Service describes the site online. The Scarboro neighborhood grew out of the backlash over those conditions.

The museum opened on March 19, 1949, as the American Museum of Atomic Energy, the day the security gates opened to the public, and took its present name in 1978. It now stands at 115 East Main Street, and its galleries follow the science and engineering that came out of Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project on. The X-10 Graphite Reactor, which went critical on November 4, 1943, as the world's second artificial reactor, is a separate stop.