Archives West Finding Aid

This small photographic collection includes images from the area of the Hanford Site in south-central Washington with views of Native Americans, of life in the towns of Hanford, White Bluffs, and the surrounding area from the early 20th century, and of the Second World War construction and Cold War nuclear facilities at Hanford. The few Native American images document fishing practices and some prehistoric archaeological sites. The pre-Hanford Site Euro-American images reveal the often untold story of 20th century homesteading, the process of town founding, and the sometimes grandiose visions of those early residents about the returns their back-breaking labor could produce. Turn-of-the-century irrigation plans called for a million acres, the same figure promised at mid-century by Columbia Basin Plan advocates after the construction of Grand Coulee Dam, and one still not reached in the 21st century to the chagrin of many Tri-Cities boosters.

Many of the images from before the 1943 creation of the nuclear site appear in histories of the area, especially Martha Berry Parker's Tales of Richland, White Bluffs and Hanford 1805-1943: Before the Atomic Reserve (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1979). A few of the Hanford Site images can be found in Michele Stenehjem Gerber's Legend and Legacy: Fifty Years of Defense Production at the Hanford Site (Richland, Wash.: Westinghouse Hanford Company, 1992) and her On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

The secrecy associated with the Hanford Site restricted public circulation of area images for decades until the Department of Energy (DOE) began releasing documents in the 1980s. After those documents exposed decades of radioactive releases and contamination, state and federal investigations resulted in the availability of more Hanford historical documents. In 1994 the Richland office of the Department of Energy initiated the Hanford Declassification Project (HDP) to make public as much previously classified operations information (documents and photographs) as possible through the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System (DDRS). Albeit DDRS is not tailored to image searches, the Richland office of the DOE also maintains a Web site under its Newsroom page called "Photo Gallery" for image-specific searches.

Here many of the early Hanford images in this collection are accessible. The Photo Gallery includes historical images predating the Hanford Nuclear Site as well as those documenting the creation, expansion and current cleanup efforts, although the pre-Hanford Site and current cleanup images predominate. The Container List below includes the Document Numbers from the Photo Gallery when images in this collection were located. Many of the images from before creation of the Hanford Nuclear Site are also found in the Parker volume and those are noted as well. For some images, the Document Number from the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System is recorded. The Photo Gallery Document Numbers and DDRS Document Numbers do not coincide.

While many of the pre-World War II and wartime images here can be found on the Department of Energy sites, the Cold War images are less accessible. This collection contains images of various sections of the Hanford Site such as the 300 Area, the Fast Flux Test Facility, and "tank farms" for radioactive waste disposal. Though the dates of most are unknown, these images document the Cold War expansion of Hanford that resulted in its current status as the "world's largest environmental cleanup" (Department of Energy).