Elza was a community in Anderson County,

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

, that existed before 1942, when the area was acquired for the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

. Its site is now part of the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

History

Elza formed around a flagstop on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The community had a country store but no

post office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional ser ...

, instead receiving mail through the nearby community of Dossett., National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, July 1991. Section E, page 5. The community's name was derived from the surname of a railroad construction engineer named Paul Elza. Construction materials for a

bridge A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...

over the

Clinch River The Clinch River is a river that flows southwest for more than through the Great Appalachian Valley in the U.S. states of Virginia and Tennessee, gathering various tributaries, including the Powell River, before joining the Tennessee River in Ki ...

and an

underpass A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, and enclosed except for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A pipeline is not a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube constr ...

near Dossett were marked "Elza" and were delivered to a shed near the

railroad tracks A railway track (British English and UIC terminology) or railroad track (American English), also known as permanent way or simply track, is the structure on a railway or railroad consisting of the rails, fasteners, railroad ties (sleepers, ...

. William "Fiddlin' Bill" Sievers, an early

country music Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, ...

guitarist and member of the Tennessee Ramblers band, was born in the Elza area in 1875.Charles Wolfe
The Tennessee Ramblers: Ramblin' On
." ''Old Time Music'', Summer 1974, pp. 5-11. Retrieved: 17 December 2008.

Manhattan Project

When the federal government evaluated sites for the Manhattan Project facilities that ultimately were sited at Oak Ridge, the Oak Ridge site was described in internal memos as "near Elza." During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, Elza was the site of one of the security gates on the borders of the then-closed city of Oak Ridge. Located on the road from Clinton to Oak Ridge, the Elza gate was "the busiest and most public" of Oak Ridge's entrance gates. When the Oak Ridge townsite was first opened to outsiders in 1949, the gate-opening ceremony was conducted at the Elza gate.

Community legacy

The Luther Brannon House, built in 1941, was a surviving structure associated with the Elza community., National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, July 1991. Section F, page 2. During World War II and for some time thereafter, the

Manhattan Engineer District The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission used several

warehouse A warehouse is a building for storing goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parks on the outskirts of cities ...

s in the Elza area for storage of

uranium ore Uranium ore deposits are economically recoverable concentrations of uranium within the Earth's crust. Uranium is one of the more common elements in the Earth's crust, being 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold. It ...

and other materials. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy cleaned up the site, where soil had been found to be contaminated by PCBs and

uranium Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...

.T. J. Vitkus and T. L. Bright
Verification Survey of the Elza Gate Site, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
ORISE 92/L-30.

Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) is a U.S. Department of Energy asset providing expertise in STEM workforce development, scientific and technical reviews, and the evaluation of radiation exposure and environmental contamin ...

, December 1992.

References

External links

60th-anniversary commemoration of the opening of Elza Gate, March 2009
(YouTube video) {{coord, 36.052579, -84.202976, display=title Geography of Anderson County, Tennessee Oak Ridge, Tennessee