RICHLAND

Formative years

In 1904–1905, W.R. Amon and his son Howard purchased 2,300 acres (9.3 km2) 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, naming it for Nelson Rich, a state legislator and land developer. In 1906, the town was registered at the Benton County Courthouse. It was incorporated on April 28, 1910, as a fourth-class city.

Population growth in Richland accelerated following the opening of a permanent bridge over the Yakima River in 1907 and a highway to Kennewick in 1926. A cable ferry to Pasco operated across the Columbia River from 1894 to 1931, when it was replaced by a modern bridge.

World War II

Richland was a small farm town until the U.S. Army purchased 640 sq mi (1,660 km2) of land – over half the size of Rhode Island – along the Columbia River during World War II for the Manhattan Project. On March 6, 1943, over 300 residents of Richland as well as those of the now vanished towns of White Bluffs and Hanford just upriver were evicted after a federal court order had condemned their properties for wartime use.

The army transformed Richland into a bedroom community for the workers on its Manhattan Project facility at the nearby Hanford Engineering Works (now the Hanford site). The population increased from 300 in July and August 1943 to 25,000 by the end of World War II in August 1945. All land and buildings were owned by the government. Housing was assigned to residents, and token rent was collected; families were assigned to houses or duplexes; single people were placed in apartments or barracks. Everything necessary was provided, from free bus service to light bulbs, and trees were planted in people's yards by the government. Much of the city was planned by Spokane architect Gustav Albin Pehrson and overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers. While dormitories and barracks were being built at the time, prefabricated duplexes and single-family homes are all that survive today. Because homes were allocated based on family size and need, there were a number of floorplans available. These were each identified by a letter of the alphabet, and so came to be known as alphabet houses.

Richland's link to the Army Engineers is suggested by its street nomenclature; many of the streets are named after famous engineers. The main street (George Washington Way) is named after the first president, who was a surveyor; Stevens Drive 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, superintendent of West Point and later founder of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. The rule is that if alphabet houses reside on a given street, they are named after an engineer or a type of tree.

Cold War era

With the end of the war, the Hanford workers' camp, originally located 15 miles (24 km) north of Richland at the old Hanford town site, was closed down. Although many of the workers moved away as the war effort wound down, some of them moved to Richland, offsetting the depopulation that might otherwise have occurred. Management of the Hanford site and Richland itself was transferred to General Electric.

Fears that the Soviet Union's intentions were aggressive set off the Cold War in 1947. The capacity to produce plutonium was increased beginning in 1947. When the Soviet Union developed and tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, the U.S. nuclear program was reinvigorated. A second post-WWII expansion began in 1950 due to the war in Korea. 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. Others lived at Camp Columbia near Horn Rapids until the camp was closed in 1950. In 2005 several dozen houses built in the northern part of the core city during this boom were added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Gold Coast Historic District.

Transition to private property

In 1954, Harold Orlando Monson was elected the first mayor of Richland and traveled to Washington, D.C., to negotiate increased rights (such as private home ownership) for citizens in military cities across the country. The U.S. Congress passed a law the following year to mandate the transfer of Richland and Oak Ridge to local control within five years, spurring a new incorporation attempt. The federal government relinquished its land holdings in 1957 and sold the city's real estate to residents; the last home was sold on May 16, 1960. Most of the people lived in duplexes; senior tenants were given the option to purchase the building; junior tenants were given the option to purchase lots in a newly platted area of north Richland.

Richland was re-incorporated as a chartered first-class city on December 10, 1958, five months after residents voted in favor of self-governance as a city. Among the first additions to the new city was an expanded public library, which had been built by General Electric out of a Quonset hut. As part of the transition, large areas of undeveloped land became city property. Richland's financial 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.

Washington State University, Tri-Cities was founded in northern Richland 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 Regional Medical Center. Columbia Basin College's Medical Training Center is near Kadlec Regional Medical Center.