Richland’s Alphabet Houses

This B house is one of the many two-family houses built in Richland during the Manhattan Project to house workers.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Article written by Robert K. Thompson

Richland, Washington’s Alphabet houses were originally built for the managers and operators of the Hanford Engineer Works during the Manhattan Project. Each of architect Gustav A. Pehrson’s 22 unique floorplans was given a letter designation, leading people to call them “Alphabet” houses. Pehrson’s pre-designed floorplans allowed Alphabet houses to be built quickly and efficiently in order to meet the military’s timeline for starting plutonium production at Hanford.¹ Construction on the first Alphabet homes began on April 28, 1943 and the first one, a B-house, was occupied on July 30, 1943. By the beginning of 1945 over 4,300 Alphabet homes had been constructed.²

Separation of Workers

Before construction on the Hanford Site began, it was decided that construction workers and manager-operators should be separated into two different communities. The manager-operators knew details about the secret project, so they were seen as security risks who should not mingle with other workers.³ Therefore two settlements developed: the temporary Hanford Camp and the permanent operator village of Richland. Housing for construction workers was intended to be temporary and rough, developing from tents and individual trailers into barracks and trailer camps.⁴ Richland was to be a permanent settlement for engineers and managers, thus requiring more permanent and higher-quality housing. This requirement was met with the designing and construction of Alphabet houses.

Efficient or Pleasant?

Multinational company DuPont de Nemours, the primary contractor for the construction and operation of the Hanford Engineer Works, determined that more permanent and higher-quality housing was needed to attract and retain white-collar managers and engineers.⁵ For over a year, Edward Yancey, Vice-President of DuPont, argued with General Leslie Groves over the price-tag for construction. Groves wanted the housing to be spartan in order to keep costs down and speed up completion. Yancey on the other hand, emphasized that adequate housing and facilities were essential for maintaining the morale of Hanford’s skilled workforce.⁶ The effects of low morale from crowded and harsh housing conditions had already been observed at the Hanford construction camp. As Groves later put it in his memoir, “Admittedly, our concern with morale was not entirely altruistic, for a stable clerical force was essential. We simply could not afford a constant turnover. The trouble was that employees found it easy to get jobs in Yakima, Seattle, and other near-by cities where living conditions were far pleasanter.”⁷ Indeed, turnover had been high in the early months for those who lived at the Hanford construction camp. Workers would often find the desert-like shrub-steppe environment and constant windstorms to be dispiriting, with many having expected an evergreen Northwest paradise.⁸

Gustav Albin Pehrson: Architect and Compromiser

Gustav A. Pehrson, a prominent Swedish, Spokane-based architect, was hired by DuPont to design the Hanford Engineer Works village of Richland. Pehrson was chosen for his pragmatism, a trait that allowed him to strike a balance between the military’s requirement of speed and DuPont’s desire for middle-class comfort.⁹ The project's tight schedule left Pehrson with only 90 days to design 22 Alphabet house floorplans and the community of Richland itself.¹⁰ The first of Pehrson’s designs, the A-house, was completed in only a week. Many of the Alphabet houses were designed as duplexes, such as the A and B house floorplans.¹¹ An employee’s rank in the corporate hierarchy determined the floorplan they were eligible for. For example, “Chief Supervisors’ and their superiors” were allotted the nicer, single-family D, G, and E homes, while “Operator to Foreman Classifications” were relegated to the less desirable A and B-house duplexes and the prefabs. Manual workers such as janitors and laborers were prohibited from occupying housing in Richland.¹²

Pehrson used a variety of techniques to help break up the monotony of Alphabet house neighborhoods. In addition to mixing homes of different floorplans on a single block, he sited homes at different angles and at varying distances from the street.¹³ Nevertheless, sometimes residents still got lost. One early Richland resident, Steve Buckingham, recalled “I was single at the time and I was dating a young lady; she lived in an “A” House; up in one of those little cul-de-sacs off of Sayers. I took her after the dance; I took her home and dropped her off in front of the house. She got clear upstairs before she realized; she was in the wrong house; somebody was snoring.”¹⁴

On this street are "M", "Q", and "R" type houses - two, three, or four-bedroom houses with full basements and oil heat.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Prefabs and Dust Storms

To supplement the slower-to-build, individually constructed Alphabet homes, DuPont shipped 1,800 prefabricated homes from Portland, Oregon. The need for housing was far greater than Groves had initially expected; Richland’s population mushroomed from 6,500 in 1943 to more than 15,000 in 1944.¹⁵ The prefabs were shipped fully assembled by rail from Portland, then trucked to vacant lots where they were unloaded by cranes. Residents recalled how frequent windstorms blew dust into the poorly sealed prefabs, with many even reporting that their roofs had blown off. The severity of the dust storms was made worse by the lack of windbreaks such as trees and grasses.¹⁶ Pehrson himself disliked the prefabs because they “lacked traditional form and architectural character.” He also worried that their introduction would create a class divide between those who lived in the prefabs which were clumped together further from the river and those who lived in nicer homes nearer to the Columbia river.¹⁷

A pre-fab home in Richland

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Amenities and Utilities

Alphabet houses were well supplied with modern amenities, including a refrigerator, a water heater, and an electric stove. They were also all provided with free coal, water, electricity, and garbage services. Furniture was provided by the company for a fee; individual residents picked out which items of furniture they wanted to be shipped to them. New, replacement lightbulbs were even provided by the company; residents just needed to fill out a requisition form to procure them. All housing was exclusively owned by the government, so residents paid monthly rent ranging from $33 to $70 in 1944 dollars or from $551 to $1,171 in 2023 dollars.¹⁸ All of the houses were constructed with high-quality, Oregon-sourced Douglas Fir, designed in a Dutch or Colonial Revival style.¹⁹ By contrast, housing at the Hanford construction camp often consisted of shacks made out of scrap lumber, plywood, and concrete.²⁰

Privatization

As Richland began its road to self-governance in the late 1950s, Richland residents lobbied the federal government for the right to purchase their Alphabet houses instead of being forced to continue as perpetual renters. Starting on October 31, 1955, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) began to appraise the property value of Richland homes for sale to private citizens.²¹ As a principle, families already renting any individual Alphabet House were given the first right of refusal to purchase that Alphabet house. After months of negotiation between the citizens of Richland and the FHA, the first Alphabet house (an M-house) was sold to Mr. Paul Huckleberry on June 20, 1957. By May of 1960, all of the previously federally owned residential properties in Richland had been transferred into the hands of private owners.²²

Today, the Alphabet Homes of Richland remain relics of the city’s unique history as a company town. Their design and the layout of Richland itself is a great example of mid-century urban planning. While few Alphabet houses remain in their original condition, they still comprise the bulk of many neighborhoods in the heart of Richland. The city of Richland has played an active role in renovating the Alphabet houses for preservation through loan programs.²³ Richland was not the only town to feature Alphabet homes, Oak Ridge has its own history of Alphabet houses.

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1. Robert Franklin, “Alphabet Houses,” SAH Archipedia, Society of American Architectural Historians, n.p.
2. Paul Beardsley, The Long Road to Self-Government: the History of Richland, Washington, 1943-1968, (City of Richland, [1968]), 5.
3. Peter B. Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 95.
4. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 94.
5. Kate Brown, Plutopia: Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38.
6. Brown, Plutopia, 39.
7. Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962), 90.
8. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 89.
9. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 96.
10. Franklin, “Alphabet Houses,” n.p.
11. Barb Carter, Home Blown: The History of the Homes of Richland, 15.
12. John M Findlay and Bruce Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West, (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011), 88.
13. Barb Carter, Home Blown: The History of the Homes of Richland, (City of Richland, [1993]), 7.
14. Buckingham, Steve, Tom Clement, Joan Sherwood, Margaret Fortune, Phyllis Grandquist, Paul Beardsley. “ABC [Alphabet] Houses Panel,” interview by Terry Andre, March 23, 1999. RG1D-4A. Transcript. Hanford Oral History Project. CREHST Museum, Richland, WA.
15. Findlay and Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days, 85.
16. Carter, Home Blown, 15.
17. Pehrson, quoted in Franklin, “Alphabet Houses,” n.p.
18. Carter, Home Blown, 13.
19. Franklin, “Alphabet Houses,” n.p.
20. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 94.
21. Beardsley, The Long Road to Self-Government, 31.
22. Beardsley, The Long Road to Self-Government, 37.
23. Carter, Home Blown, 26.

Bibliography

Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. London: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Beardsley, Paul. The Long Road to Self-Government: the History of Richland, Washington, 1943-1968. City of Richland, [1968].

Buckingham, Steve, Tom Clement, Joan Sherwood, Margaret Fortune, Phyllis Granquist, Paul Beardsley. “ABC [Alphabet] Houses Panel.” Interview by Terry Andre. March 23, 1999. RG1D-4A. Transcript. Hanford Oral History Project. CREHST Museum, Richland, WA.

Carter, Barb. Home Blown: The History of the Homes of Richland. Richland, WA, [1993]. Franklin, Robert. “Alphabet Houses” SAH Archipedia. Society of American Architectural Historians, n.d.

Groves, Leslie R. Now It Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project. [1st ed.]. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962.

Hales, Peter B. Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 

Findlay, John M. and Bruce Hevly. Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011.