Hanford High School II

Every man, woman and child, including the dearly departed, were evicted, never to live here again.

Just a few vestiges of their lives remain. A once-thriving bank, standing as a desolate bulwark in the wind. A cookhouse painstakingly constructed of river rock. Hints of where a ferry landed. An abandoned school, once the heart and soul of a community.

That’s just about all that was left when 1,500 people were ordered by the federal government to pack up their belongings including livestock, vehicles and furniture, and leave.

In 48 hours.

Three town sites about 70 miles from Yakima — White Bluffs, Hanford and North Richland — were wiped from the land practically overnight to make way for the Manhattan Project on the edge of what is now the Tri-Cities.

The project, conducted in ultra-secrecy on the Hanford Site starting in 1943, marked both a beginning and an end. It’s where plutonium was produced for the first nuclear bomb, which ended World War II, simultaneously ushering in the nuclear age.
Read less