Incoming links: B Reactor
They made gunpowder. Then the American Civil War came. Billions, baby.
Military links carried over well into World War II, where e.g. they built the B Reactor.
The B Reactor of the facility produced the plutonium used for Trinity and Fat Man, and then for many more thousand bombs during the Cold War. More precisely, this was done at
Located in Washington, in a dry place the middle of the mountainous areas of the Western United States, where basically no one lives. The Columbia river is however nearby, that river is quite large, and provided the water needed by their activities, notably for cooling the nuclear reactors. It is worth it having look on Google Maps to get a feel for the region.
Unlike many other such laboratories, this one did not become a United States Department of Energy national laboratories. It was likely just too polluted.
Bibliography:
Aerial image of the Hanford site in 1960
. Source. 
The lab that made Chicago Pile-1, located in the University of Chicago. Metallurgical in this context basically as in "working with the metals uranium and plutonium".
Given their experience, they also designed the important X-10 Graphite Reactor and the B Reactor which were built in other locations.
Some of the most notable ones:
- 1942: Chicago Pile-1: the first human-made nuclear chain reaction.
- 1943: X-10 Graphite Reactor: an intermediate step between the nuclear chain reaction prototype Chicago Pile-1 and the full blown mass production at Hanford site. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- 1944: B Reactor at the Hanford site produced the plutonium used for Trinity and Fat Man