When Bill Dowis and his family settled into their new H house in Richland in March of 1944, they were excited to be part of a spanking new town.

It was called Richland Village, or, more officially, Hanford Engineering Works Village.

To most it was simply "the village" or Richland.

During wartime, it was rare to have a new house, let alone a new town, because so many materials were devoted to the wartime effort.

People coming to work in nearby communities had to make do with any old place to live.

For some, that was a garage or a remodeled chicken coop.

But not in Richland. There, thousands of new homes, some quite grand by 1944 standards, were going up.

Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, noted during one of his visits that the new city was downright luxurious and wondered why the government was building such grand houses.

They ranged from tiny prefabs on a cement slab in the middle of a dirt field to two-story, three-bedroom homes along a scenic riverside.

Dowis, his wife, Helen, and two daughters had moved from a rented home in Denver into the new three-bedroom home in Richland with a view of the Columbia River.

"Everyone was in the same boat, and it was easy to make friends. The whole thing was exhilarating," Dowis said.

The isolation and lack of comforts of Richland in 1944 made it necessary to provide incentives to make Hanford competitive on the tight wartime labor market.

Richland was a town of low rent. Dowis said they paid $50 a month for their place.

According to Michelle Gerber, who has done extensive research on early day Hanford and Richland, Richland Village contained 4,329 individual housing units and 25 dormitories.

There were eight different styles of houses - designated A, B, D, E, F, G, H and L - and three styles of prefabs.

When General Electric took over in 1946 and Hanford became a permanent defense facility, a new building boom began and more houses were added to the alphabet soup mix.

In 1944, the new community also included 24 stores, three churches and five schools.

Houses came with furniture, electricity, fuel (mostly coal), water and maintenance.

Everything was taken care of for free.

The landlord was Du Pont and later General Electric under contract from the federal government.

Arlene Denton, who now lives in Kennewick, remembers having to stay in a barracks until she married L.E. Denton in 1945. They moved into a three-bedroom prefab on Thayer Drive.

Once when she tried to defrost the refrigerator with a knife, she accidentally punctured a coolant line.

She was told by officials at tenant relations it was her fault and she would have to pay the $75 cost of repairs.

"That was more money than my husband made in a week and he was not too happy," she said.

She said other contacts with tenant relations were happier.

"I remember they would come out and reupholster your furniture for free."

Because everyone was new in town, there was a tremendous need to bond with each other, and Richland had a large number of service clubs and social organizations.

Richland also was a town of young adults. From 1946 to 1948, it had the highest birthrate in the nation, Gerber said.

The town attracted attention from the national media for other reasons.

A San Francisco Chronicle reporter referred to the town as a "shiny new village, isolated, self-contained, happy."

In 1949, Time magazine termed Richland, "a model residential city ... an atomic age utopia."

One thing that brought this utopia down to Earth was blowing sand.

An unpleasant memory of anyone who lived in a prefab back before lawns and trees was the amount of dust that sifted through the loose-fitting doors and windows.

Max Walton, a retired Richland businessman who now lives in California, remembers the coal deliveries that residents had to be prepared for on the day coal arrived or face the consequences.

"I remember forgetting to close all the doors once, and there was coal dust all over the house. My wife wasn't too happy," he said.

Walton was one of the few businessmen in the new town, operating an accounting and insurance firm and providing various services normally provided by the county auditor.

"The government would control how many businesses there were in town and a business was in effect a franchise. It was great for the guy who had a franchise."

He said Richland was a class-conscious town, starting with the top scientists and engineers and working down.

People would often get their housing assignment based on "rank," much like a military base.

When it came time for self-government, there were people who complained the government was asking too much for the property.

While people like Walton eventually moved on, Dowis and his wife stayed.

Today, they live in an R house, which they moved into in 1948.