Editing Hanford Site (section)

===Construction workforce===
DuPont advertised for workers in newspapers for an unspecified "war construction project" in southeastern Washington, offering an "attractive scale of wages" and living facilities.<ref name="milwaukeesentinel">{{cite news |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=UEMxAAAAIBAJ&pg=7157%2C1687590 |title=Needed by E. I. duPont de Nemours & Company for Pacific Northwest (advertisement)|newspaper=Milwaukee Sentinel |date=June 6, 1944 |access-date=March 25, 2013 |pages=1–5 }}{{Dead link|date=October 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> Normally for a development in such an isolated area, employees would be accommodated on site, but in this case for security and safety reasons it was desirable to locate them at least {{convert|10|mi}} away. Even the construction workforce could not be housed on site, because some plant operations would have to be carried out during start-up testing. The Army and DuPont engineers decided to create two communities: a temporary constructions camp and a more substantial operating village. Construction was expedited by locating them on the sites of existing villages to take advantage of the buildings, roads and utility infrastructure already in place. They established the construction camp on the site of the village of Hanford, and the operating village on that of Richland.{{sfn|Jones|1985|pp=450–451}}
[[File:Hanford workers.jpg|thumb|left|Hanford workers line up for paychecks.]]
The construction workforce peaked at 45,096 on June 21, 1944.{{sfn|Manhattan District|1947e|p=4.14}} About thirteen percent were women, and non-whites made up 16.45 percent. African-Americans lived in [[Racial segregation in the United States|segregated]] quarters, had their own [[mess]]es and recreation areas,{{sfn|Findlay|Hevly|1995|pp=16–19}} and were paid less than white workers.{{sfn|Brown|2013|p=27}} Three types of accommodation were provided at Hanford: barracks, hutments and trailer parking. The first workers to arrive lived in tents while they erected the first barracks. Barracks construction commenced on April 6, 1943, and eventually 195 barracks were erected: 110 for white men, 21 for black men, 57 for white women and seven for black women. Hutments were prefabricated [[plywood]] and [[Celotex]] dwellings capable of accommodating ten to twenty workers each. Between them, the barracks and hutments held 39,050 workers. Many workers had their own trailers, taking their families with them from one wartime construction job to the next. Seven trailer camps were established, and at the peak of construction work 12,008 people were living in them.{{sfn|Jones|1985|p=455}}{{sfn|Manhattan District|1947e|pp=5.6–5.10}}

DuPont put the contract for building the village of Richland out to tender, and the contract was awarded to the lowest bidder, [[Gustav Albin Pehrson|G. Albin Pehrson]], on March 16, 1943. Pehrson produced a series of standard house designs based on the [[Cape Cod (house)|Cape Cod]] and [[ranch-style house]] design fashions of the day.{{sfn|Hales|1997|pp=95–99}} Pehrson accepted the need for speed and efficiency, but his vision of a model late-20th-century community differed from the austere concept of Groves. Pehrson ultimately had his way on most issues, because he worked for DuPont, not the Army.{{sfn|Hales|1997|pp=95–99}} The resulting compromise would handicap Richland for many years with inadequate sidewalks, stores and shops, no civic center, and roads that were too narrow. Unlike Oak Ridge and [[Los Alamos, New Mexico|Los Alamos]], Richland was not surrounded by a high wire fence, thus Matthias asked DuPont to ensure that it was kept neat and tidy.{{sfn|Findlay|Hevly|1995|pp=36–39}}