Kentucky Life | Fort Knox Gold

The U.S. Gold Depository at Fort Knox, commonly known as the gold or gold fortress, was constructed in the late thirties.

During the 1930s we were in the Great Depression.

President Roosevelt decided the only way to bring the economy out of its situation was for the government to control the money, manufacturing and the money.

In 1933, President Roosevelt signed the Gold Act, which basically made it illegal for people to own gold.

People turned in their gold coins and things of that sort, and the government melted them down into gold bars, weighing approximately 27 and a half pounds.

Well, as the thirties rolled on, there was a problem in Europe by the name of Hitler, and they were concerned about our gold reserves, which were kept at New York and Philadelphia being attacked.

So they decided to construct a gold vault at Fort Knox because it was 1000 miles in from the eastern coast.

It was west of the Appalachian Mountains, which at that time was a reasonable barrier.

And also it was the home of the new armored force for the United States Army.

So they decided that would help protect it.

The gold vault itself is a two story building with a one story basement and is built primarily from Ford Concrete and steel.

There is some granite that was used in the outer plating and so forth.

It's really a unique structure coming from New York and Philadelphia to Kentucky.

The gold was shipped on trains.

The gold was actually shipped by U.S. mail.

But once it arrived at Fort Knox, the military provided an escort, an armed escort, mind you, from the railroad siding to the gold vault itself.

At that point, local farmers and other people who were hired by the Treasury Department actually loaded the gold from the trucks into the gold vault itself.

And believe it or not, the gold shipments were actually advertised in the local newspaper.

And you can go down and watch it.

My connection to the gold vault is I was hired in 1975 as part of a group of young people that was chosen by the Treasury Department to help them do audits at the vault.

The audits were an outgrowth of a 1974 visit by United States senators and congresspeople and the media to the depository.

In answer to a lot of politicians and pundits saying that there was no gold in the depository.

In 1975, they started doing audits of the compartments at the Bullion Depository, and those would go over the next decade.

They would audit that building, the counting of the gold.

They would weigh it.

They would assay it.

I got a phone call in the summer of 1975 from a man who was with the school board, and he asked me if I would like a job.

And I said, Yeah.

I was gotten out of high school and I was, you know, looking for work.

And I would spend the next 11 years doing various jobs for the United States Mint because we thought it was going to be like Goldfinger.

Fort Knox, the world's biggest bank.

All of us had seen Goldfinger.

And so our whole idea of what we were going to be in was what we saw in that that movie.

Then you realize you're going down into the basement and you're basically in an O.D.. GREENE Typical military facility, and the gold doesn't sparkle and it isn't fancy.

It weighs a ton.

And you drop one on your hands, you'll break every bone in your hand.

So the glamor wears off about bar number two, and you realize you're not getting to take any of it, you know?

So, yeah, it's not Goldfinger.

The US Gold Depository in Fort Knox exists to house America's treasures.

And initially, it started as a depository for for gold bullion and later on has developed into a kind of a holding cell for a lot of other things beside bullion.

Over the years, it's housed some of the great treasures of America, like the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

They also held it back during that time period, the Magna card of the British Magna Carta.

Keep it out of the hands of the Nazis as they amass great treasures.

And they had such things as the crown of St Stephen, their ones that were the Hungarian crown jewels into the 1950s of stockpiling of drugs inside the gold vault for for use in in the manufacture of morphine and stuff, in case a nuclear attack on the United States.

The security at the gold vault has been updated over the years, but even in the 1930s it was considered to be the ultimate.

They made it the most secure place on earth in the earlier days.

Security at Fort Knox was good, but today it's almost done believable.

We used to be able to drive tourists up in front of the gold vault and take a picture of them standing in front of the Goldwater way.

You would in front of any other government building.

Nowadays, if you go by the gold wall and pull out a camera, the conference gated.

In the post 911 World, it probably has everything.

It should be security wise.

But as one who was there in the 1970s, security at the Bullion Depository was mostly legit.

Guards carried Thompson submachine guns and 38 caliber pistols.

And I mean, it was it was old school, old school, FBI stuff, you know, bunch of metal stacked in a building.

That's not fun.

It's more fun to believe that you've got pop up machine guns and that you've got minefields and ground to air missiles, you know, And I can flood the vault.

The security array around that building over the years has grown massively.

When I was a kid, there were trees all around the gold vault.

It was woods all over the place there.

But it's not like that now.

So after 911, I mean, Fort Knox went into serious lockdown.

And as you know, to this day, you can no longer stand out on the street, take pictures.

These these guys take security very seriously.

When you say Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Most people think of the gold vault.

They even forget it.

There's soldiers at Fort Knox.

Even if you go to a foreign country and you say Fort Knox, they know what you're talking about.

It is one of those things that makes us kind of who we are.

We say to ourselves, you know, we're a powerful country and the wealth of this country is world renowned.

And I think if you go into any country in the civilized world and you say Fort Knox, they say gold and they say the United States.

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