The Secret City

Like Arthurdale, West Virginia, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the federal government. Unlike Arthurdale, its creation was a closely guarded secret.

Home to some 75,000 workers and site of the largest building in the world, Oak Ridge didn't appear on maps during World War II, and was separated from the outside world by barbed wire and security fences until 1949. Many of the workers didn't learn what they were working on until the bombing of Hiroshima. Jay Searcy described the moment in his 1992 article, "My Nuclear Childhood."

On Aug. 6, a Monday, we were just sitting down for lunch when my father heard President Truman come on the radio. We huddled around the set. A B-29, he announced, had dropped a new kind of bomb on Hiroshima, a bomb more powerful than 20,000 tons of conventional explosives - and the main component had come from Oak Ridge, Tenn.

"It's a bomb!" my father shouted. "We've been making an atom bomb!" My sister, Mary Glenn, began to cry, partly out of fear and partly because she had been told by my father that they were making paper dolls at the plants.

The natural uranium that went into the plants by the boxcar-load was code-named "tuballoy"; the enriched uranium that came out by the ounce was called "oralloy." Keeping the purpose of the plants under wraps required absolute secrecy.

Phones were tapped. Mail was inspected. Some top scientists used aliases, and names of other key project personnel weren't allowed to appear in newspapers (only first names were used in reporting the high school's first football games). Death certificates of employees accidentally killed on the project were classified and weren't delivered to next of kin until after the war.

Due to security precautions, the football team never played home games.

Curiously, a Tennessee mystic named John Hendrix predicted the creation of a city at Oak Ridge forty years before construction began.

One day, after weeks of absence, Hendrix reappeared at a crossroads store and told a group of neighbors he'd seen a startling vision.

"In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder," Hendrix reported. "The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for 40 nights and I would be shown visions of what the future holds for this land.... And I tell you, Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. And there will be a city on Black Oak Ridge.... Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake."

"I've seen it," he concluded. "It's coming." [Link]

A Town Poorly Planned for the Poor

Arthurdale, West Virginia, has a peculiar history. It was America's first New Deal Homestead—a community designed by the federal government under the watchful eye of Eleanor Roosevelt. Like so many other projects planned in Washington, it quickly went over budget.

The pre-fabricated houses, even when it was known that they were unsuitable for West Virginia winter and wouldn't fit their foundations, were still built but then torn to pieces and remodeled. An article in the August 1934 Saturday Evening Post speaks of how chimneys were built eight feet away from their houses' sides, after which the houses were reconstructed to meet the chimneys.

165 homes would eventually be erected (160 of which still stand), to be inhabited by poor folks willing to have their daily lives micromanaged by politicians.

The "colonists" — or "homesteaders" as the press and politicians often referred to them — were the lucky few selected from among the indigent coal miners by the screening process. If they thought they were getting "relief" they would have been correct, but they were getting a bit more in the bargain, too. They were to be resettled, fed, clothed, and housed by order of the politicians, and in addition they were to live on a stage set. Knowingly or not, they were a propaganda piece.

The location of Arthurdale—far from transportation and markets and therefore unattractive to industry—doomed the project. The social experiment ended in 1948, and the properties were sold off to the homesteaders for as low as $750.

Today the town has a wonderful museum that keeps the memory of her beginnings alive, and every year the residents, many descendants of the original settlers, play host to the New Deal festival.

I wonder if it was Eleanor who came up with the imaginative names for Arthurdale's roads.

[Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-001050-C DLC]

Chamber of Secrets

The town of Upton, Massachusetts, has taken possession of a mysterious man-made cave called the "Upton Chamber."

Barbara Burke, chairwoman of the Historical Commission, says the chamber is perhaps three centuries old. She bases that on an 1893 newspaper article, which states that elderly residents at the time said their ancestors had talked of the cave and and did not know who built it.

Some say Colonial settlers might have used the chamber to store ice or vegetables. Others think it may have been a Native American ceremonial site. [Link]

Still others think it was built "under the influence of Irish monks in the 8th century."

Albert's On the Market

For a mere $2.5 million you can own the town of Albert, Texas.

A weathered wood sign is nailed to the trunk of a towering live oak that dates to the early 1500s, when Spanish conquistadors were searching for gold in what is now known as Texas Hill Country. "Albert, Texas Population 4," the sign says, but Bobby Cave smiles sheepishly and confesses that it's an exaggeration.

"I made that up," the owner of Albert says of his census-taking.

Albert is named for Albert Luckenbach, whose wife, according to the Handbook of Texas, gave the original homestead her husband's family name. She was a postmaster, and when a new post office was opened on Williams Creek, she and her husband moved there in 1892 and renamed the unincorporated town then known as Martinsburg. [Link]

A Place No Pigs Would Die

As a longtime vegetarian, I'm familiar with my people's long struggle to thrive in meat-loving America. The Vegetarian Settlement Company tried back in 1856 to found an enclave for non-carnivores on the Neosho River in Kansas.

It was hoped to bring together vegetarians of common interests and aims; otherwise they, "solitary and alone in their vegetarian practice, might sink into flesh-eating habits."

By establishing a permanent home for vegetarians, it was believed that a program of concerted action could be followed, with a system of direct healing, as well as permitting the practice of the vegetarian principle. Members were required to be of good moral character, not slaveholders, and applications had to be approved by the board of directors.

The settlement was to have octagonal villages, with sixteen farms along the eight sides and a central octagon to be used for a common pasture or park. The four corners of the outer octagon were to be used for woodland or grassland.

Sadly, the experiment was short-lived.

One writer blames the promoters for "gross mismanagement," if not something worse. The location of the colony was beset by mosquitoes, and chills and fever attacked the settlers. The "inexhaustible" springs dried up, and the crops that were planted were raided by neighboring Indians. Bitter disappointment and much suffering resulted. As winter neared, all who could leave did so. [Link, via MetaFilter]

Mrs. Miriam Davis Colt's "Thrilling Account" of the "Ill-fated Expedition" includes a list of those who made the trip to Kansas to watch their dreams of a vegetarian utopia vanish.

Towns That Refuse to Give Up the Ghost

Those towns in Georgia may be small, but nothing compared to the towns that appear in Wikipedia's List of places with fewer than ten residents.

One of the townships listed under "Places with one resident" is Erving's Location, New Hampshire, which may or may not have one resident.

According to the 2000 census, one person lived in Erving's Location. However, in a recent "Sunday News" New Hampshire newspaper edition (printed on June 27, 2004), Suzan Collins, the Coos County administrator, said the following about Erving's Location: "We're required to do an inventory of property lists and there isn't anyone who is a registered resident. I don't know how the census picks this up." She also said that the only taxable property in Erving's Location are telephone poles. [Link]

My great-grandfather's family lived for a time in a nearby township called Cambridge. It just missed the list, having exactly ten residents in 2000.

Also on the list for having one resident is Holy City, California—founded in 1919 by William E. Riker, a cult leader who propounded celibacy for others and bigamy for himself. The tiny town even had its own radio station once.

A radio station offering a variety of programming was built in 1924, and went on the air on July 7 of that year under the call letters KFQU. Though the call letters may appear obscene, they were issued sequentially and could not have been deliberate. The station went off the air in December 1931, and had its license renewal denied on January 11, 1932, due to "irregularities." [Link]

This article about Karen Keller of Hibberts Gore, Maine, makes an interesting point: If you're a town's only resident, your personal census data is available for all to see.