Richland Washington Community Profile

Here is a little information about Richland, Washington, one of the cities in the the Tri-Cities region.    

History of West Richland

Data source - Wikipedia

For centuries the village of Chemna stood at the mouth of the current Yakima river. Today that village site is called Columbia Point. From this village the Wanapum, Yakama and Walla Walla Indians harvested the salmon runs entering the Yakima river. Captain William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition visited there on October 17, 1805.

Formative years

In 1904-1905, W.R. Amon & his son Howard, purchased 2,300 acres and proposed a town site on the north bank of the Yakima river. Postal authorities approved the designation of this town site as Richland in 1905. In 1906 the town was registered at the Benton County Courthouse. It was incorporated on April 28, 1910 as a Washington Fourth Class City.

The war years

Richland was a sleepy little farm town until the US Army purchased 1660 km2 (640 square miles - half the size of Rhode Island) along the Columbia River for the war effort, evicting the 300 residents of Richland as well as those of the now vanished towns of White Bluffs and Hanford just upriver. The army turned it into a bedroom community for the workers on its Manhattan Project at the nearby Manhattan Engineering District (later the Hanford Nuclear Reservation). The population increased from 300 in July and August of 1943 to 25,000 by the end of World War II in August of 1945. Richland became a closed city (federally controlled Atomic Energy community), with access restricted to residents and other personnel authorized by the U.S. Army. Mail was postmarked Seattle and many addresses were misleading.

An interesting aspect of the fact that much of the city was planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, is that many of the streets are named after famous engineers. For instance: Stevens Way is named after John Frank Stevens, chief engineer of the Panama Canal and Stevens Pass; Goethals Drive is named after George W. Goethals, designer of the Panama Canal; and Thayer Drive is named after Sylvanus Thayer, founder of the first professional school of engineering in the United States at Dartmouth College. The rule is, if alphabet houses reside on a given street, it is either named after an engineer, or after a type of tree.

The end of the war

With the end of the war, that Hanford workers camp, originally located 15 miles north of Richland at the old Hanford town site, was closed down. Although many of them disbanded as the war effort wound down, some of these workers moved to Richland, offsetting the depopulation that might otherwise have occurred.

The Cold War boom

Fears that the Soviet Union’s intentions were aggressive set off the Cold War in 1947. When the Soviet Union developed and tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949, the U.S. nuclear program was reinvigorated. Richland’s Cold War construction boom resulted in Richland’s population growing to 27,000 people by 1952. Many of these people lived in a construction camp of trailers located in what is now north Richland. With time these trailers were vacated and the core city grew.

Richland was incorporated in 1958 as a chartered First Class City, an open self-governed city. Richland's dependency on the federal Hanford facility changed little at this time because Hanford's mission as a weapons materials production site continued during the Cold War years.

After the production boom

With the shutdown of the last production reactor in 1987, the area transitioned to environmental cleanup and technology. Now, many Richland residents are employed at the Hanford site in its environmental cleanup mission.

Richland contains many reminders of its past. Richland High School's sports teams are called the Bombers - complete with a mushroom cloud (at one point there was a campaign to change this to the more politically correct B-17 logo after the B-17G "Day's Pay" bought by Hanford workers in 1944 for the United States Army Air Forces, but the cloud still prevails). Some of the streets are named after generals in the US Army (Patton Street, MacArthur Street, Sherman Street, and George Washington Way) and after various nuclear themes, (Einstein Avenue, Curie Street, Proton Lane, Log lane, and Nuclear Lane). A local museum (Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science, and Technology (CREHST)) features exhibits of nuclear technology.

Washington State University Tri-Cities was founded there in 1989, growing out of a former Joint Graduate Center which had been affiliated with the University of Washington, Oregon State University and Washington State University. Richland is also home to Kadlec Medical Center, one of the best hospitals in eastern Washington. There is a developing "medical district", including a Columbia Basin College Medical Training Center near the Kadlec facility.

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