Golf in Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge was built in absolute secrecy during World War II as one of the three primary sites of the Manhattan Project, a federal facility that employed tens of thousands of workers — most of whom had no idea what they were producing — to enrich uranium for the first atomic bomb. The city was constructed on a previously rural stretch of Roane and Anderson County ridgeland, hidden from view by the ridges of the Ridge and Valley province, and remained a secret to most of the outside world until the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. The American Museum of Science and Energy in downtown Oak Ridge tells this story, and the Y-12 National Security Complex continues to operate on the original Manhattan Project footprint. The city's unusual federal genesis gave it a highly educated workforce, excellent schools, and civic infrastructure well above what its size might suggest. Golf in Oak Ridge serves this distinctive community in the forested ridge-and-valley terrain of the Tennessee River's upper watershed.