Richland, WA

The Columbia and Yakima rivers meet at Richland, where human history extends far beyond the federal city built in 1943. Indigenous communities lived along these rivers for over 11,000 years, and the Sahaptin-speaking Wanapum, Walla Walla, and Yakama maintained settlements and fishing grounds in the area. Chemna, a village near the Yakima's mouth, gave one early name to the place. Settlers established a small agricultural town in the 1890s, and Richland incorporated in 1910. Irrigation, orchards, and river access defined that community until 1943, when the federal government selected nearby Hanford for plutonium production and remade Richland as housing for the project's managers and workers. That abrupt conversion remains visible in the street plan and Alphabet houses. Architect Gustav Pehrson developed 22 lettered house designs, and construction began in April 1943.

Over 4,300 Alphabet homes had been built by early 1945, during a period when Richland grew from about 250 residents before 1943 to roughly 15,000 by 1945. Curving residential streets, repeated plans, and neighborhood green space came from the wartime effort to build an entire community quickly. The federal government retained ownership of these houses after the war, began selling them to residents in 1957, and transferred the last former federal residences to private owners by May 1960. A homebuyer can still encounter those letter names and standardized forms across central Richland, where an urgent wartime housing program became ordinary private neighborhoods. Science and federal work continue, although Hanford's mission is now environmental cleanup and restoration.

In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy and its regulators adopted a revised framework for soil, groundwater, and legacy-facility cleanup, confirming that the long project remains active and evolving. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Richland campus conducts work in grid modernization, energy storage, national security, nuclear science, computing, biology, and earth systems. Its laboratories include battery research, radiochemical facilities, and river and groundwater sampling tied directly to the surrounding landscape. Washington State University Tri-Cities adds a public campus near the Columbia, with engineering, science, nursing, education, business, and wine-related study connected to regional industries. These institutions make research, cleanup, and technical education visible parts of local working life. On the Columbia, Howard Amon Park has occupied donated riverfront land since 1911; Manhattan Project workers gathered there during the 1940s, and current residents use its paved path, playground, wading pools, boat launch, and bandshell.

Richland's seven-mile Riverfront Trail forms part of the 23-mile Sacajawea Heritage Trail loop through the Tri-Cities. The REACH Museum links the same landscape to public history through exhibits on Ice Age floods, Indigenous and agricultural history, the Manhattan Project, and native Columbia River fish. On July 24 and 25, 2026, the annual Art in the Park festival filled Howard Amon with artists and performances. In Richland, an Alphabet-house street, a national laboratory, a history museum, and a waterfront festival all lead back to the Columbia and the city's unusual federal past.