ORNL FCU 75 Years

Nineteen forty-eight was a tumultuous time in the world. Following the war, much of Europe lay in ruins with its cities bombed, its economies destroyed, its people facing starvation. In the United States, there was an abundance of products and raw materials to sell but few trading partners capable of buying them. President Harry S. Truman solved the problem with the Marshall Plan, which helped Europe rebuild and laid the foundation for renewed prosperity at home. In this atmosphere of intense economic and political uncertainty, a handful of employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory formed a credit union as a means of offering their fellow employees an alternative to commercial banks and other for-profit financial institutions. Their goal: to create a source of low-cost credit and a convenient place to save their hard-earned money.

Above: Aerial view of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in the 1940s. (US Department of Energy)

1948-1958 The Beginning | 13