Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern allowance of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about 25 miles (40 km) west of downtown Knoxville. Oak Ridge’s population was 31,402 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Knoxville Metropolitan Area. Oak Ridge’s nicknames include the Atomic City, the Secret City, the Ridge, the Town the Atomic Bomb Built, and the City Behind the Fence.

In 1942, the United States federal dealing out purchased approximately 60,000 acres (240 km²) of farmland in the Clinch River Valley for the move forward of a planned city supporting 75,000 residents. It was build up with guidance from architectural and engineering perfect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, from 1942 to 1943. Oak Ridge was conventional in 1942 as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the frightful American, British, and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb. Being the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, scientific and technological development nevertheless plays a crucial role in the city’s economy and culture in general.

The prehistoric substantial leisure interest of the Oak Ridge Place occurred during the Woodland period (c. 1000 BC – 1000), although artifacts dating to the Paleo-Indian era have been found throughout the Clinch Valley. Two Woodland mound sites—the Crawford Farm Mounds and the Freels Farm Mounds—were external in the 1930s as allocation of the Norris Basin salvage excavations. Both sites were just southeast of the former Scarboro community. The Bull Bluff site, which was occupied during the Woodland and Mississippian (c. 1000–1600) periods, was uncovered in the 1960s in anticipation of the construction of Melton Hill Dam. Bull Bluff is a cliff brusquely southeast of Haw Ridge, opposite Melton Hill Park. The Oak Ridge Place was largely uninhabited later than Euro-American explorers and settlers arrived in the late 18th century, although the Cherokee claimed the land as allowance of their hunting grounds.

During the early 19th century, several rural farming communities developed in the Oak Ridge area, namely Edgemoor and Elza in the northeast, East Fork and Wheat in the southwest, Robertsville in the west, and Bethel and Scarboro in the southeast. The European-American settlers who founded these communities arrived in the late 1790s after the American Revolutionary War and after the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Holston, ceding what is now Anderson County to the United States.