ORNL and the “secret city” of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were built in a hurry in the early 1940s in a sparsely populated region of East Tennessee as part of World War II’s Manhattan Project.
At the time, there were four small settlements in the area — Scarborough, Robertsville, Wheat and Elza. Many homes in these agricultural communities were removed as construction progressed, and most of the rest were demolished after the war to make room for new development. So, you might not expect to find a 200-year-old log cabin in the neighborhood today.
Nevertheless, about a mile from the laboratory’s boundary, Freels Bend Cabin sits atop a rise overlooking Melton Hill Lake. Edward Freels is credited with building the oldest portion of the cabin in about 1810. The Freels family had arrived in East Tennessee from North Carolina in the 1790s and farmed several hundred acres in the area, raising corn and cattle.
When the cabin was built, not far from Scarborough, the homestead looked out over fields leading down to the Clinch River. It gained a lakeside view only after the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the river in the early 1960s, an act that almost, but not quite, inundated the structure. That was just the latest example of the cabin’s knack for survival.
When the government purchased the surrounding farmland in 1942, the cabin was preserved as part of a picnic area for Manhattan Project staff, and it continues to be used for recreational purposes and as an educational center for local schools and ORNL.
The cabin consists of two large rooms — the one that Edward Freels built in 1810, which has a loft that is reached by a ladder, and another added in 1844. The rooms share a large, limestone chimney, also added in 1844. This arrangement — two rooms on either side of a chimney — is known as a “saddlebag” cabin for its resemblance to a saddlebag that hangs over either side of a horse.
New windows and doors were added around 1900. In the late 1940s, the Atomic Energy Commission replaced the mud chinking between the logs with concrete and built a covered porch that wraps all four sides of the cabin to make it more suitable as a recreation venue.
The cabin is the only remaining 19th-century dwelling in Oak Ridge and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
Visiting the rustic cabin today, in a secluded corner of the DOE’s Oak Ridge Reservation, it’s easy to imagine that it’s still the early 1940s. It’s harder to fathom the scale of the transformation that the Manhattan Project brought to the region, to the world, and, particularly, to the lives of the residents of four small farming communities, as they were relocated to make way for the enormous scientific and industrial undertaking that ushered in the nuclear age.
