Anasazi Indians occupied the Parajito Plateau between AD 1150 and the 16th century, leaving thousands of ruins hidden in the backcountry.
In 1918, Detroit businessman Ashley Pond established the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. The school was quite successful for nearly 25 years, but suddenly closed its doors in 1942.
In the fall of that year, General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer drove up through the Jemez Mountains from Albuquerque looking for a secluded site for the labs. They found it at Pond's school on the Parajito Mesa, and shortly thereafter the government took over Los Alamos Ranch School, turning its buildings into laboratories.
Scientists, many of whom knew little about the research they would be doing, were brought to the site from around the country, and work officially began at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories in April 1943. For the next two years, completely unknown to all but the highest government officials, they engaged in a race with the Germans for the first atomic bomb.
By the summer of 1945, after a series of setbacks and growing ambivalence among the workers about the projects, the Americans had won. "Fat Man," the world's first atom bomb, was ready to be tested.
Just before dawn on July 16, at Trinity Site, 60 miles northwest of Alamorgordo, the bomb was dropped from a tall tower. The flash, which could be seen from as far away as Santa Fe, Gallup and El Paso. Three weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were flattened, and Japan surrendered.
Since the war, Los Alamos has maintained its position as a leader in defense -industry research, working largely under contract with the University of California.