HANFORD SITE ACQUISITION

(1943)
Places > Hanford Engineer Works

In February 1943, General Leslie Groves tasked Colonel Franklin T. Matthias of this staff with transforming the desert wasteland into an industrial community of more than ordinary size. In the broad valley within the big bend of the Columbia River were facilities insufficient even for an advanced operating base. Only 1,500 people lived on the more than 400,000 acres of the proposed site (at about a density of 2.2 persons per square mile), and nearly all of these were engaged in or dependent upon agricultural activity, either grazing or irrigated farming. In the southeast corner of the site near the intersection of the Yakima and Columbia rivers was the village of Richland with a population of 250. Twenty-three miles to the north up the river was Hanford with a population of 100. The village stood on the riverbank, where the State of Washington operated a free ferry connecting with grazing lands to the north and east on the Wahluke Slope. A few miles beyond Hanford was White Bluffs, no larger than Richland, which served as the center of the Priest Rapids irrigation district. Surrounding the town were a few farms struggling to survive on irrigated orchards or carefully watered fields of mint or asparagus. Beyond the irrigated areas around White Bluffs in every direction was a vast sea of sagebrush and cheat grass that provided scanty forage for up to 20,000 sheep during the winter and spring. Along the eastern side of the river were precipitous cliffs rising three or four hundred feet to the grazing land that sloped, gently at first, back to the crest of Saddle Mountain. Off to the south and west, towards the center of the site, was Gable Mountain, a low volcanic outcrop, and past that some twenty miles away the barren slopes of the Rattlesnake Hills, whose crest marked the proposed boundary on that side.

Matthias set up a temporary land office in the town of Prosser, on the Yakima south and west of the site. He had orders to acquire an area roughly circular in shape with a diameter of about 29 miles. Divided into more than 3,000 tracts held by 2,000 owners, the acquisition was among the most complex ever accomplished by the federal government.

Unlike at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, the Army had considerably more time in which to acquire the site. Both the Army and the DuPont Corporation thought large-scale construction before summer 1943 highly unlikely. This meant that clearing construction areas, aside from certain key tracts, would not have to begin for a period of nearly six months. Groves and other top project officials therefore decided to follow an acquisition procedure that they hoped might help limit the inevitable rise of local opposition. Government attorneys delayed issuance of the usual declarations of taking, while acquisition officials sought to secure as many tracts as possible by direct purchase. Officials were hopeful that this would result in more settlements out of court. They were also hopeful it would allow farmers more time to harvest mature crops, thereby countering public criticism bound to arise from the apparent adverse effects of acquisition on the current national program for production of more "food for victory."

Almost from the start, however, the Army encountered trouble. Associations of property owners in the irrigation districts became the natural rallying point for those seeking higher values for their land. Although the Army could acquire options with relative ease, final settlements were hard to negotiate. The tight security regulations bred rumors alleging misuse of the right of eminent domain, collusion between DuPont and the Army, waste of government funds, and favoritism in appraisals. Hanford area residents complained to Congress. News of the acquisition controversy reached Washington just at the time the administration was greatly concerned about the likelihood of severe food shortages in the country. In response to an inquiry from the White House, the War Department replied that the Army was doing everything possible to protect agricultural interests at Hanford and anticipated salvaging more than three quarters of the crops. At a Cabinet meeting on June 17, President Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the question as to whether the leaders of the atomic bomb project might not consider moving the plutonium production installation to another site. Groves briefed Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the issue later that afternoon, noting that Hanford was the only place in the U.S. "where the work could be done so well." Reassured, Stimson called the President and "satisfied his anxiety."

By mid-July 1943, residents had been removed from the core site area that included White Bluffs and Hanford. For farms with crops not yet harvested, Matthias arranged to bring prisoners from the federal penitentiary in Tacoma to serve as a semi-permanent agricultural work force. This saved many crops but further riled landowners because there was no means to pay them for the additional compensation many hoped to receive as a result of what turned out to be an exceptionally abundant harvest. The record harvest also prompted landowners to seek higher valuations for their properties. In October, the first condemnation trials by jury began in the federal district court in Yakima. These did not prove favorable to the government as sympathetic juries often awarded settlements that were higher than even what the landowner was asking. Proceedings moved slowly, and, by the end of 1946, 236 cases still remained to be settled. In the end, the total cost for the government was not much above the initial estimate of $5.1 million.

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), and Manhattan District History, Book IV - Pile Project, Volume 4 - Land Acquisition HEW. Additional information about the region comes from Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For the history of the public works projects that were so vital to life in eastern Washington, see Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The photograph of Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Leslie Groves, and Franklin Matthias is courtesy the DuPont Corporation; it is reprinted in Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1967). The Hanford location map is courtesy the Hanford Site.