This bronze bell was designed in Oak Ridge and cast in Japan in 1993 to serve as a symbol of the bonds of friendship and mutual regard that have developed between Oak Ridge and Japan over the past fifty years…Friendship made so much more meaningful because of the terrible conflict of World War II which Oak Ridge played such a significant role in ending. This bell further serves as a symbol of our mutual longing and pledge to work for freedom, well-being, justice, and peace for all the people of the world in the years to come.

Given to the people of Oak Ridge on the occasion of their 50th birthday by the Oak Ridge Community Foundation and Friends in the United States, Japan, and other nations.

The road in front of Union Station was named for John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.) in Europe during World War I.

John J. Pershing was born September 13, 1860 in Laclede, Mo. The oldest of nine children, Pershing excelled academically and won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1886.

His service included the 6th Cavalry who fought against the Apache, the 10th Cavalry in Santiago campaign of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Pershing served in the Philippines from 1899 to 1903, and became military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt raised his rank from Captain to Brigadier General, promoting him ahead of 862 higher-ranked officers.

In 1916, after commanding the army that entered Mexico in pursuit of Poncho Villa and his rebels, he became a public figure in the United States. When sent to France in 1917 as commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, he insisted American Army would fight as an independent force, rather than merely filling the ranks of the battered Allies in their slow trench warfare.

By Act of Congress, Pershing was named General of the Armies of the United States. He retired from active duty in 1924 and died July 14, 1948 at the age of 88.

In 1854, the Rev. Thomas Gilmore, a Methodist circuit rider, led a revival at Pecan Grove on the north side of Salado Creek. He organized a Methodist Church and a Union Sunday School in a small frame building. During the next decades, the congregation met in a brush arbor and at Salado College before constructing a Carpenter Gothic sanctuary in 1890 on the corners of Stagecoach and Church streets. Initially served by pastors on the Belton circuit of the Methodist Church, the congregation became part of the Salado circuit, or charge, which included churches in Bartlett, Bell Plains and Prairie Dell. At the turn of the 20th century, the Salado circuit remained active, with an Epworth League for the church youth and a missionary, Emma Stone (Poteet) Pilley, serving overseas in Japan and China. Members also started a church library. By 1910, the circuit consisted of the Salado, Bell Plains and Prairie Dell congregations, which all continued to thrive. Each included programs such as vacation bible school and the Women's Society of Christian Service, as well as active youth and Sunday School programs. The Bell Plains church consolidated with the Salado church in 1940, and in 1951, the Prairie Dell members did the same, moving their long-time sanctuary to Salado to serve as a fellowship hall for their new congregation. With a strong historic foundation of three area congregations, Salado United Methodist Church has continued to grow and thrive, contributing to its community through various programs and services. Due to area development, the church moved to this site in 2005, incorporating its 1890 sanctuary within new facilities.

The modern Texas rice industry was shaped in part by the Mayumi brothers, who arrived here from Japan in the early twentieth century. Rice had been grown in limited quantities in Jefferson County since the 1840s, but production remained relatively low for decades. Many believed that with improved agricultural practices the crop could become successful in the region. In 1902, Japanese Consul General Sadatsuchi Uchinda attended a Beaumont meeting of the Rice Growers Association of America, who offered an open invitation to Japanese rice farmers. Yoshio Mayumi, a banker and landowner from Mie prefecture on the main island of Honshu, visited this area in 1904 and returned the following year to purchase more than 1,700 acres near Taylor Bayou. Mayumi brought fifteen workers from his hometown, and the farming community included a three-story house for Mayumi's family, another building for the workmen and a community dance hall. Although Yoshio's only crop was rice, he also owned and raised livestock, including hogs and cattle, and to help with farm work, mules and horses. The agricultural experiment showed early promise, but several factors led to its eventual decline. Yoshio returned to Japan in 1915 and left the operation to the management of his brother Yasuo. Economic difficulties and repressive immigration laws led the Mayumi family to sell the land in 1924. The Mayumi legacy, centered on a family fondly remembered for its many contributions to the rural community, is important because it presaged the success of the Texas rice industry, which is today and economic mainstay of the upper Texas Gulf coast.

During World War II, the U.S. established three internment camps in Texas for alien civilians in the U.S. and Latin America, and one was located in Kenedy. The U.S. repatriated German, Japanese and Italian detainees in trade for American prisoners held overseas. The Kenedy Camp opened on April 21, 1942, and over the next 30 months it housed more than 3,500 internees. Five who died while confined in the camp are buried here. The site became a branch P.O.W. camp for Fort Sam Houston from 1944 until 1946. In 1976, the El Cibolo Chapter of the D.A.R. marked the gravesites.

Camp Huntsville, completed here in 1942, was one of the first prisoner of war (POW) camps built in the U.S. during World War II. Designed to house 3,000 POWs, it had more than 400 buildings, as well as eight branch camps. The first POWs, part of Germany's Afrika Corps, arrived in spring 1943, and by fall the population peaked at 4840. Late in the war the camp became a branch of Camp Hearne (Robertson Co.). In Sept. 1945, Camp Huntsville sent its German POWs to Camp Hearne in preparation for the arrival of Japanese POWs at this site. The camp closed on Jan. 5, 1946, and the government transferred more than 800 acres, including buildings, to Sam Houston State Teachers College for use as a country campus.

In early 1943 during World War II. the United States Army hurriedly acquired over 600 Square miles of land around the farming villages of White Bluff's and Hanford. Former residents, including Native Americans whose ancestors had traditionally fished and hunted here, were barred from entering the site. Complete secrecy surrounded the newly established Hanford Engineer Works.

In the months that followed, nearly 60,000 workers built a complex of facilities that included the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor--the B Reactor. the Hanford Engineer Works was part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, a vast effort to design and manufacture the world's first atomic bomb.

The B Reactor produced plutonium used for the first atomic explosion on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and for the bomb dropped the next month on Nagasaki. The Second World War ended day's later, with Japan's surrender.

I n 1968, the B Reactor ceased operation. Now. the U.S. Department of Energy is managing an extensive cleanup and disposal effort air the radioactive by-products at the Hanford Site.

War began in 1939 between the Axis (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) and the Allies (France, Britain, and others). In 1940-41, German forces conquered most of Europe and North Africa and invaded Russia. Japan joined the Axis and attacked the US at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. For three years the war raged throughout the world. On D-Day, June 6, 1944 Allied forces landed at Normandy and drove across France into Germany. With Russian troops closing in from the east, Germany surrendered on VE Day, May 7, 1945. Allied forces in the Pacific mounted an island-hoping campaign brought them close to the Japanese homeland. US bombers dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945.
US losses: 293,000 KIA, 130,201 POW, and 78,976 MIA.