Los Alamos: Displacement

Los Alamos Ranch School students pose after a hunting trip several years before the Manhattan Project.

LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

Places by Type

• Secret Cities & Communities
• Behind the Fence
• Breaking Scientific Boundaries
• Untold Stories
• Legacies

Before the arrival of the Manhattan Project in 1943, the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico was sparsely populated. Local homesteaders worked the land. Not-so-local boys attended the Los Alamos Ranch School atop one of the plateau's mesas. When the Manhattan Project came, homesteaders had to abandon their cabins, and the school was forced to shut down. Manhattan Project workers repurposed some of the ranch school’s 54 buildings, and began constructing a laboratory and community. Almost overnight, Los Alamos became a gated, secret city with only two ways in and two ways out.