Los Alamos history museum anchors self-guided Manhattan Project walking tour

At 1050 Bathtub Row, the Los Alamos Historical Society’s museum sits next door to Fuller Lodge. From there, the route moves past a 13th-century Ancestral Pueblo site and threads through the wartime homes and civic buildings that turned a ranch school town into a lab community.

Start at the museum on Bathtub Row

Guided walking tours run Monday through Saturday from the Los Alamos Historical Society’s museum at 1050 Bathtub Row, next door to Fuller Lodge. Tickets are $25 and include museum admission; children under 18 are free with an accompanying adult. Even if you prefer to go at your own pace, the museum is the right first stop because the tour begins at the oldest layer of the landscape, the 13th-century Ancestral Pueblo site.

About 900 years ago Ancestral Pueblo people moved to the Pajarito Plateau and established permanent settlements here. The museum preserves and shares the history of Los Alamos and its people.

The oldest stop comes first

The Ancestral Pueblo site near the museum is the clearest reminder that Los Alamos was lived in long before the Manhattan Project. The site includes bedrooms, kitchens, storage rooms and a semi-circular kiva used for ceremonies and meetings. Stay on the sidewalk when you view it, because this is still a protected historic place, not an open excavation.

The public street outside the museum can feel like a modern county center, but the site beside it reaches back centuries.

Ashley Pond and Fuller Lodge turn the route toward town life

From there, the walk naturally shifts to Ashley Pond, the public park and gathering space that connects homesteading, school history and community events. Ashley Pond Jr. founded the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1917, and the school operated until 1943. The National Park Service dates the school’s establishment to 1918.

The land changed hands quickly once the wartime effort arrived. On Dec. 7, 1942, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told A.J. Connell that the property would be acquired for military purposes. The site had already appealed to the Manhattan Project because the mesas and canyons offered a remote, inaccessible landscape.

Fuller Lodge sits just as squarely in the middle of that shift. It began as the Ranch School dining hall, then became a community center for Manhattan Project workers, and is now an art center. The last Los Alamos Ranch School graduation was held there in 1943, right before most students and personnel left to make way for the project. Locals still use the building as a civic landmark.

Bathtub Row is where secrecy still has a street address

Bathtub Row is the famous stretch most visitors want to see, and it is worth slowing down instead of rushing past. The homes there were originally built by the Ranch School for faculty and special events, then became residences for J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe and William “Deak” Parsons. During World War II, homes with bathtubs were rare, so the houses with private tubs were reserved for higher-ranking Manhattan Project personnel.

The Bathtub Row houses were sold to private citizens in the late 1960s, but they remain part of the Los Alamos National Historical Landmark District. That district was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, and in 1984 the County Council designated the area as the Fuller Lodge Historic District. The district still includes Fuller Lodge, the Guest Cottage now used as the History Museum, and the Ranch School Power House.

One of the most useful landmarks for visitors is the Hans Bethe House. Bethe was a Nobel laureate who headed the Manhattan Project’s Theoretical Division.

Add the Romero Cabin to see what came before the lab

The Romero Cabin, built by Refugio and Victor Romero in 1913, gives the route a homesteading-era counterpoint to Bathtub Row. The cabin was relocated to downtown Los Alamos in 1984 and restored by the Los Alamos Historical Society.

That wider timeline also includes early Spanish settlement and later homesteading on the plateau. Those layers are part of the same landscape, which is why the History Museum can cover homesteading, the Ranch School, the Manhattan Project and the Cold War on one campus.

Finish at the Ice House Memorial and look at the broader park

The Ice House Memorial helps tell the story of the site’s role in the Trinity device and the first nuclear test. The Gadget was detonated at Trinity on July 16, 1945.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park is not a traditional gated park. It is spread across visitor centers, museums, historic sites and points of interest, with accessible historic sites in the public town and additional areas behind the fence at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos is about 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, and it has about 30 official Manhattan Project landmarks.

For anyone planning a short outing, the route is simple: museum, Ancestral Pueblo site, Ashley Pond, Fuller Lodge, Bathtub Row, Romero Cabin and the Ice House Memorial. Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are the other two communities in the park.