The museum we went to is called the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was created in 1949 to educate people about nuclear energy and how Oak Ridge played a part in the Manhattan Project. The town was created in the 1940's as a base for the project. It is the site where they enriched uranium which lead to the development of the atomic bomb. The facility that was built there was the largest building in the world at the time. From 1942 to 1945 the population of the area grew from 3,000 to about 75,000.
The project was was so secret that most of the local people who worked there didn't even know what it was all about. They were just told to sit at their stations and flip this switch, and turn that knob. They didn't realize they were assisting in enriching uranium and so forth.
