“One of the Best Sites on the East Coast”: When LIGO Might Have Been in the Blueberry Barrens of Maine

The historiography of the siting of big science sites presents site selection for facilities as bureaucratic processes that are both simple and successful. However, the facilities of prior scholarship obtained sites through eminent domain power. In these instances, the central issue was not whether a site was acquirable but at what cost. As the sensitivity of precision instruments evolves, so do the complexities of the site selection processes. This article explores one such facility, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The goal of the LIGO physicists was to locate one of two highly precise, large-scale instruments in the Blueberry Barrens region of Northeastern Maine – a candidate site assessed by the physicists rather than government entities. Funded by an array of sources, including the National Science Foundation and universities, the project lacked the ability to rely on eminent domain power. This absence of eminent domain reveals the complex history of physicists, rather than agency officials, conducting site selection – a process that is often obscured from historical analysis when conducted through federal-level bureaucracies. Through elucidating discrepancies between the physicists’ imagined ideal use for the land as a laboratory host and the local community’s preexisting utilization of the same parcels for blueberry cultivation, I argue that obtaining sites for large-scale facilities is a multifaceted process that is not achievable until scientists understand candidate sites as an assemblage of their natural, built, and social environments; their constituencies; environmental histories; and the diverse imaginaries of scientists and the local community.