A LOOK AT OUR HISTORY
About ORHPA
The Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association (ORHPA) is a nonprofit historical society founded in 1999 to preserve and educate the public about Oak Ridge’s unique and rich technical and cultural history, and to work to preserve selected historical buildings of the WWII city and nuclear installations.
Oak Ridge was the most costly part of the Manhattan Project and its greatest gamble. Three large and different plants, first of their kind anywhere, consumed 89% of the Oak Ridge effort, each built in the hopes we could learn to enrich uranium-235 and beat Nazi Germany to the bomb. In addition, the world’s first plutonium production reactor for research was also built here.