Stories of Displacement

In September, 1942 United States Army General Leslie R. Groves was assigned to manage the Manhattan Project. He acquired funding, mobilized a diverse workforce including attracting top scientists, and selected the ideal locations for the project to ensure secrecy and success in this new, top-secret undertaking. Ultimately, Groves approved three locations for this new clandestine project: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

This unassuming jelly kettle from Manhattan Project National Historical Park contains multiple layers: indigenous, pioneer, and federal. When we zoom in on a single layer of the jelly kettle’s story, we can see how women’s everyday work supported their homes and homelands. If we zoom out and place these layers in succession, we can see how one group’s vision of home has often meant the destruction of another’s. Explore more stories in the "Home and Homelands" exhibition.

The rights and stipulations enumerated in the treaties of 1855 still impact local tribes. Fishing and hunting on ceded land remain cherished rights. These treaties also codified arbitrary boundaries drawn by United States officials when delineating tribal identities. The Yakama Treaty confederated fourteen disparate tribal bands into the Yakama Nation while the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla Treaty placed three separate tribes onto one reservation.

The Hanford area’s contributions to the Manhattan Project and World War II started with the peoples living in and around the Priest Rapids Valley. In early 1942 the approximately 1,500 residents of the region were informed that the government had acquired their lands under the war power authority. Landowners were given small settlements and 30-90 days to be off their land. The Army also barred area Tribes, who had used the area for traditional practices for time immemorial.

Vernita was one of the many small communities that developed during a period of settlement at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, few signs remain of the former community. Located in northern Benton County with the Priest Rapids Dam upriver and the abandoned town of White Bluffs downriver, Vernita marked a historic embarkation point for travelers crossing the Columbia River.

The name Hanford is forever tied to the Manhattan Project and development of the world’s first atomic weapons, but few traces remain of the town upon whose ruins the nuclear age was born. Although the town of Hanford was less than 40 years old when government bulldozers leveled its buildings to construct plutonium production facilities in the early 1940s, its residents had already built a resilient community and agricultural economy.

When the Hanford Site construction began in 1943, several cemeteries existed in the Priest Rapids Valley. Most of these cemeteries were not in areas of construction and would be left undisturbed; however, the White Bluffs Cemetery laid in the path of development. That cemetery was forced to relocate, along with several family burial plots, for what the residents knew of at the time as the “Hanford Engineer Works Project.”

Judge Cornelius Holgate Hanford and his son-in-law Manley Bostwick Haynes established the town of Hanford at the turn of the 20th century. From establishing an irrigation district to constructing commercial buildings and homes, Hanford and Haynes transformed the Priest Rapids Valley for decades. In 1942, the valley was radically transformed again with the arrival of the Manhattan Project.

The First National Bank of White Bluffs served the small pre-Manhattan Project community of White Bluffs. The economy of White Bluffs grew to the size to support a bank in the later part of the first decade of the twentieth century. New irrigation systems resulted in an increase in the number of new farms in the area and a bank in the area would allow potential new farmers in the area to finance their farms. The bank was built in 1907-1908.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, farmers and entrepreneurs dreamed of large irrigation projects to transform Washington’s arid Priest Rapids Valley into a fertile breadbasket rivaling California. Soon irrigation ditches and canals both real and planned crisscrossed the region. Constructed in 1892, the Horn Rapids Dam (renamed Wanawish Dam in 1997) was the cornerstone to irrigation efforts along the lower Yakima River.