From Places Between to Industrialized Countryside: Creating Enriched Uranium and Coal-Fired Energy in the Ohio Valley in the Early Cold War Era, 1952–65

In southern Ohio in late 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) broke ground on a uranium-enrichment plant on the farmland of Pike County. Piketon, the new plant’s main location, is about twenty-five miles north of the small industrial Ohio River city of Portsmouth, Ohio, along the Scioto River’s route from Portsmouth to Columbus. Plant construction began in Piketon in December 1952 as part of AEC’s expansion for Cold War defense purposes, and occurred simultaneously with a major industrialization of the Ohio Valley. The industrial transformation of this area of the Ohio Valley had implications for the environment, for national security, for the region’s labor force, and for the future development of the power industry.

This article considers the environmental, social, political, and economic aspects of the development in the Ohio Valley during the 1950s. The new atomic plant site in the Piketon area and the new power plants in Ohio and Indiana created an industrialized countryside out of farmland, something between metropolitan and rural, and a new type of environment in the early Cold War era. This article focuses on the early years of optimism and construction of the enrichment site and steam electric power plants in rural spaces of southern Ohio and southern Indiana. The forces behind the projects—the electric companies creating power plants and the AEC—sought the water, labor, coal, land, and location necessary for the creation of large amounts of enriched uranium and electricity available in the valley. Two forces—the AEC and the group of electric utilities that came together as the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC)—worked together on a joint public-private project that made use of both farmland and waterways in the region to produce large amounts of electricity for the energy-intensive process of uranium enrichment. Locals negotiated and at times courted these developments for the struggling areas, and local boosters emphasized the desirability of the industrial countryside as a place to live and work. The location in the countryside—close to major populations but with open land—met the needs of coal and atomic production.

This specific type of countryside environment attracted the industrial sites, and the new plants changed the countryside. The countryside, as developed here, refers to the land between cities and the “wildlands,” following Samuel P. Hays’s division in his postwar study of environmentalism and environmental policy, Beauty, Health, and Permanence. Hays utilized these categories because the “perception and experience, from which distinct ideas and action flow” differed based on the physical environment.¹ Hays noted that “until World War II the American countryside was land nobody wanted.”² After the war, it became an area under dispute—whether it should be used for its scenery or for the open land and resources it offered. Hays’s categorization fits the valley’s situation after 1945 because the environmental qualities of the countryside—open land, natural resources, less traffic, and lower population density—drew new industry to the Ohio Valley. Politicians and business leaders specifically categorized the development within a “countryside” discussion and emphasized its superiority to cities in expanding industry after World War II. Rather than discussing the land within a “wildlands” context, these leaders looked to make this countryside useful, a common impulse in the second half of the twentieth century.

This study joins others in social and environmental history in considering the role of the hinterland or countryside in postwar U.S. history. Urban environmental histories have provided some of the important groundwork in developing connections between social life and the path of industry in the physical environment, and this study seeks to use a social and environmental perspective to consider a more neglected environment.³ Adam Rome, in The Bulldozer in the Countryside, has considered the effects of postwar suburban housing development on the “open land” around sprawling cities.⁴ Rome’s work considers the way middle-class people became increasingly aware of the environmental movement through development of the countryside, while...