Manhattan Project National Historical Park – Hanford

Before World War II, before there was Tri-Cities, before the word “Hanford” became imbued with the slightly sinister frenzy of the unstoppable wartime effort to build bombs whose explosions could be seen from space, before the cleanup and the regular news stories about nuclear waste and contamination and downwinders, there were small settlements surrounded by agricultural land, where about 1,500 Euro-Americans staked their claim to the shrub-steppe desert. There were irrigation projects that pulled water from the mighty Columbia River to the fields, producing plums, peaches, grapes, clover, bluegrass, alfalfa, and rye. There was a bank, supposedly robbery-proof, and a grand high school sitting on a knoll overlooking the river. There were farm dinners and hard work and high school dances. There were vacationers from the state’s west side, who came seeking rest and relaxation and clear water and strong sun and blue, blue skies.

Lucky for us twenty-first-century visitors to the Hanford Unit of Manhattan Project National Historical Park, there are free tours to take us back in time and space, to when Hanford was the name of a village and a high school and White Bluffs signified both a geological curiosity and a farming community.

Hanford Reservation Tours

When I read that the Hanford tours were starting, I knew I wanted to go. And I knew I wanted to go with our friends Barb and Rennie, who lived in Tri-Cities for many years. So when Mr. Adventure had a conference in Tri-Cities, I jumped at the chance to come along, and we invited Barb and Rennie to join us.

At 10AM sharp on a gonna-be-a-hot-one Saturday, we met at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park visitor center for an orientation. The tour would focus on the pre-World War II period, beginning in the early 1900s. And while for millennia this area has been home to many indigenous peoples, primarily the Wanapum with some Yakama, Palus, Sinkuise, and others, most speaking dialects in the Sahaptian language group, their history was largely absent from this tour and, therefore, from this post. The park is working with local tribes to rectify this glaring gap. The sooner the better, too.

After a few more safety reminders (rattlesnakes, unexploded ordnance, sunstroke, restricted zones), volunteer docents Larry and Joe shepherded us onto the tour bus. The tour follows the “horn” of the Columbia River, the place where the river turns sharply north, then south, in the Priest Rapids Valley. 

The valley is buffered on three sides by interesting geological formations. To the west is Rattlesnake Mountain, the highest treeless mountain in the United States. About 6.5 miles to the north, across the river, is the 30-mile-long ridge of Saddle Mountain. Below it is the Wahluke Slope, a broad bar formed by Ice Age floods. These areas were part of the security buffer seized by the federal government for Hanford, and now form the bulk of the 196,000-acre Hanford Reach National Monument. Wild by default, it now protects important shrub-steppe habitat, flora and fauna, and archaeological sites. 

We drove about 30 miles along Highway 240, a state road built along the base of Rattlesnake Mountain in 1965 to connect the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to the Tri-Cities. Turning onto a gravel road, we arrived at the first stop.

Bruggemann Warehouse

An extraordinary structure of round stone walls sat behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Built of Columbia River cobble stones, the Bruggemann Warehouse was part of a large farm owned by Paul Bruggemann, a German immigrant who fought for his homeland before emigrating to the United States in 1926. Four years later he married a local girl, Marie Allard, who helped run the 227-acre farm while raising their two children. They grew stone fruit, grapes, rye, and alfalfa, all of it watered by the Hanford Irrigation Canal system. The docent said that at one point the Bruggemanns employed more than 100 people. Old irrigation channels radiate out from the warehouse, and cement foundations reveal the locations of former buildings. “Don’t go out into the grass,” Joe said. “Snakes.” I spotted a crinkly white snake skin at the edge of the grass and decided to take his advice.

A huge pile of river rocks is all that remains of a house that once stood there. Those rocks, though! Looking at the pile and then at the warehouse, I thought about the effort it must have required to haul the stones up from the river, then sort them for building. Some smaller rocks were placed carefully to buttress window and door frames. Others, all about the same size, were set on end, running in a straight line about three feet up an exterior wall. On each of the chimney’s four sides, a face made of rock, each with a different expression, looks out.

We walked around the house, trying to imagine a bustling farm with trucks hauling crops and workers harvesting the fields. The docents passed around pictures of the farmstead in its heyday, but those black-and-white images didn’t bring the scene before me to life. Then, on our way back to the bus, Rennie spotted an unusually shaped rock in the pile. “It’s a sinker stone,” he said, explaining that Columbia River native peoples drilled holes into stones to help hold down fishing nets. The unassuming gray stone, next to a broken timber and one of thousands in the pile, was an archeological find. He told the docents, who promised to tell park staff.

White Bluffs

We continued on to the townsite of White Bluffs, named for the dramatic gray-white sediment layers exposed by the river on the opposite shore. This is the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia, and while I expected churning rapids, this was more of a gentle riffle. Through binoculars we could see a decrepit log cabin. Although it’s near the site where a Hudson’s Bay fur trading post once stood, the remnant now visible was built much later. Nearby a sign warned, “You are leaving the Hanford Site Emergency Zone.” An osprey nest perched in a utility pole just beyond.

The first Euro-American settlers arrived here in 1861, but this spot was a transportation hub beginning in the late 1840s, when the first steamer from Portland plied the river. A ferry across the river made White Bluffs an important destination for miners, gold seekers, tourists, and settlers moving through the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century. 

Irrigation made farming possible in the early 20th century, and White Bluffs was advertised as “the California of the Northwest” and “America’s Valley of the Nile.” The town flourished. Seattleites came for the dry, clear air, adding tourism dollars to the agricultural economy. Historic photos show schoolchildren posing on the school steps, marching bands, a service station, a baseball player frozen in time, waiting for the pitch. It’s all gone, except for one building.

A lonely concrete structure, the First Bank of White Bluffs stands just over a mile from the river. Advertised as impenetrable, the building had a fatal flaw: its roof was wood. The bank was robbed twice. The first robbers got away. The second time, the robber was apprehended in Moses Lake, 35 miles northeast, but didn’t have the money with him. He’d buried it somewhere along the way, and it’s never been found. The bank was rehabilitated and you can see the inside, including the vault, but a ranger has to be there to let you in.

Outside, under a layer of desert plants, the town’s original sidewalks are still visible, suggesting a once-bustling main street. The ranger stood by the bus, warning us away from a large brush pile opposite the bank: “Rattlesnake nest.” I sensed a theme. 

Allard Pump House

Irrigation companies promoted the Priest Rapids Valley for farming, promising a longer growing season and good soil. Still, farming is a whole lot of hard work, and without reliable irrigation there was little chance of success. Most farmers here were customers of the Hanford Irrigation & Power Company (HIPC), whose pump house stands on the banks of Columbia River. Because the site is culturally significant to local tribes, visitors are allowed to view the pump house only from a distance.

The pump house raised water about 50 feet from the river to the Hanford Irrigation Canal, whose remnants crisscross the valley and were visible throughout the tour. This 36-mile-long open irrigation trench, lined with Portland cement to minimize leakage, pumped vital water to a few hundred customers and survived the Great Depression, when many farmers lost their land and left. The HIPC operated until 1943, when residents — including Native Americans, who utilized important fishing, hunting, and ceremonial sites along the river for at least 10,000 years — were forced to leave to make way for the Hanford Site.

In the far distance, B Reactor stood, a geometric tiered concrete cake in a thicket of electric poles and wires. I tried to look objectively at the structure, without the scrim of seven decades of nuclear experiences coloring my view. It’s difficult, though. This was the first operational nuclear reactor ever built. Plutonium was manufactured here to power the “Fat Man” atomic bomb, which killed tens of thousands of people in Nagasaki and helped bring an end to World War II. Cleanup of radioactive waste from Hanford is one of the biggest environmental and political issues in the state. Surrounded by desert and roofed by sky, the site looks forbidding. And yet our guides were nuclear engineers, living examples of the prosperity this country enjoyed for decades after World War II. They were proud of their work and clearly loved this place. One local historian described B Reactor as a “real Pandora’s box of history…a marvel of science and engineering [that] helped to create this world of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety.” Time to get back on the bus.

Hanford High School

Built in 1916, this stately building was more than a school. A social center and community gathering place, it symbolized the aspirations residents had for their children: education, self-sufficiency, success. The original building burned in 1936 and was rebuilt the following year, but the new structure would be used for only six years before the federal government took over the area for construction of what was then cryptically called the Hanford Engineering Works. 

Now, of course, we know what happened here. When the federal government chose the area for its secret atomic weapon development program, residents were notified in early 1943 that they had 30 days to leave. Within months, more than 50,000 construction workers lived in hastily built camps surrounding the abandoned high school. Standing on the gravel road, we gazed out at empty shrub steppe (“Don’t approach the building,” a docent said. “There are snakes.” Got it.). The only relic of the huge encampment are ribbons of asphalt sidewalk running haphazardly through the landscape. It’s eerie and beautiful, a ghostly reminder of once-vibrant communities both before and during World War II.

Back to the future

As the bus made its bumpy way back to the visitor center, Larry and Joe sensed our fatigue. Some folks fell asleep. I stared out the window, thinking about the shadowy remnants we’d just seen. As far as I know, the only pre-World War II buildings remaining on the Hanford Site are those we visited: the Bruggemann Warehouse, the Allard Pump House, the First Bank of White Bluffs, and Hanford High School. Everything else was demolished by the government when it took over the area, although perhaps there are other structures still standing in places too hazardous to allow visitors.

Hanford’s prominence didn’t end when World War II did. The Hanford Site was an important Cold War producer of nuclear energy until 1987, when the last operating reactor was shut down. Today the major activity at Hanford is cleanup, a task involving more than 8,000 employees working for several federal and state agencies. 

The Hanford Site is half the size of Rhode Island, and it felt like we’d driven a fair chunk of it. We were all ready for a cool drink and something to eat. Barb and Rennie’s older son had recommended Bombing Range Brewing Company, next door to the visitor center. First, though, we stopped in at Whimzees, a small store next to the brewery, where Larry and Joe had suggested we look for souvenirs. It was a funky place, with t-shirts and hats crammed next to Christmas ornaments and vintage glassware.

The owner’s father had worked at Hanford, and she showed us a museum of sorts she’d constructed in the back room that replicated the interior of an “Alphabet Home,” one of the thousands of houses designed and built in Richland to house military officers, scientists, and engineers working on the Hanford Project. The government needed to move thousands of people to Hanford quickly. Those people needed somewhere to live. Richland was a sleepy farming hamlet. Perfect.

The Alphabet Houses

The astonishing thing about the Alphabet Houses — really, about the city of Richland — is that the entire city was planned in 90 days by a Spokane architect hired for that purpose. Gus Albin Pehrson designed the street layout, shopping centers, utilities, schools, and houses. He worked so fast that it was easiest to simply assign a letter to each house type. The “A” house was a two-story, three-bedroom duplex. The “U” house had two bedrooms and one bath on a single level. The “Y” house is the most numerous, with 950 built, and featured three bedrooms and one bath in just over 1,200 square feet.

Modern architecture enthusiasts can pick up a copy of ABC Homes: The Houses that Hanford Built at the gift shop or read the catalog online, then go find examples of the various styles. I love the Alphabet Houses. Mr. Adventure and I had spent a couple of hours driving slowly around Richland the previous evening, identifying the various types. 

And here, in the back of this small gift store, was a reconstructed interior of the house the owner grew up in. She picked up items at garage and estate sales, she said, and others were from her family. Alphabet house owners could buy furniture designed for the houses from a catalog, and her family bought a dining set, bed frames, and dressers for their “F” house, a two-story, three-bedroom unit with distinctive front-facing gables over the upstairs windows. For a midcentury enthusiast like me, this was heaven.

Lemonade and beer debrief

Inside the excellent Bombing Range Brewing Company, we gulped down lemonade and beer and debriefed the day. It was fascinating to be able to go onto the Hanford Reservation, certainly. The four-hour tours are free, which seemed amazing to me, and easy to reserve online. Seeing the pre-nuclear sites gave us a sense of what it might have been like before Hanford was Hanford. We all wished the tour had a bit more narrative context and a lot more native history, but agreed the docents did what they could with a complex and sprawling history.

It’s hard to tell a cohesive story across four hours and a lot of driving, but we decided the day’s theme was displacement: first of Native Americans, then of Euro-American settlers and farmers, then of confidence in our safety. We also decided we will definitely come back for the B Reactor tour, where I’ll bet former nuclear engineers are in their element as tour guides. I hope there’s no quiz, because physics isn’t my strong suit.