The History of Fort Knox

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Army needed places to train hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville was one of 16 new training camps. In December 1917 the Army began using old maneuver grounds near West Point, Kentucky, where it had held exercises in 1903, as an artillery range for troops from Camp Taylor.

A tent camp went up in the spring of 1918, and the first field artillery unit, from the 84th Division, moved in on April 1. That summer the War Department chose Stithton, a small farming town just to the south, as the site of a permanent camp. The Army bought the land, and Stithton's residents moved away. Their houses became homes for officers, and St. Patrick's Catholic Church became what is now the Main Post Chapel, the oldest building on Fort Knox.

In August 1918 the Army's chief of artillery, Major General William J. Snow, announced that the new camp would be called Camp Knox, in honor of Henry Knox, the Continental Army's chief of artillery. Snow also set up the Field Artillery Central Officers Training School there. The war ended on November 11, 1918, before the camp was finished, and construction slowed sharply.

By the end of December 1918 the camp held about 9,000 troops, its wartime peak, according to the Army's history of the post. Through 1919 Camp Knox was used to discharge soldiers coming home from France and to train artillery officers.

After the war the Army cut back sharply. In 1921 the Army announced that Camp Knox would be a summer training center for college students in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and for the Citizens' Military Training Camps, from the Fourth and Fifth Corps Areas.

In 1922 the artillery school moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the Army closed Camp Knox as a permanent post. It stayed open only as a seasonal training area managed by the Army's Fifth Corps Area.

For a short time, from 1925 to 1928, the land was even designated the Camp Henry Knox National Forest. The executive order that created the forest was later canceled, and the designation ended.

Summer camps kept the grounds busy. Thousands of young men came each year for a few weeks of drill, marksmanship, and camp life, which kept the site in use until the Army found a new mission for it.

In 1930 the War Department created an experimental Mechanized Force to test how tanks, armored cars, and trucks could replace horses. On the recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel Adna R. Chaffee Jr. and Colonel Daniel Van Voorhis, Camp Knox was chosen in 1931 as the home of the mechanized cavalry, because its size and rolling terrain suited vehicle training.

On January 1, 1932, the camp became a permanent post again and has been called Fort Knox ever since. A large building program followed. The brick barracks, headquarters, and family housing designed by the Army's Quartermaster Corps in the early 1930s now make up the Fort Knox Historic District.

The mechanized cavalry worked out the early rules of armored warfare in exercises across the post. In early 1937 the 1st Cavalry Regiment (Mechanized) guarded the gold moving into the Treasury's new depository, and it also helped during the great Ohio River flood that hit the region that winter. The development of these machines is part of the wider story told on the U.S. armed forces page.

During the Great Depression, Fort Knox was also an induction center for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Trainloads of young men from West Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky were processed there, and the Corps and the Works Progress Administration helped build roads and buildings on the post.

After Germany's armored divisions overran France in the spring of 1940, the Army moved quickly. On July 10, 1940, it created the Armored Force, headquartered at Fort Knox, with Chaffee as its first chief. It was responsible for building armored units, writing their doctrine, and training their soldiers. The 1st Armored Division was formed at Fort Knox that same month.

In October 1940 the post opened the Armored Force School and the Armored Force Replacement Training Center. Thousands of draftees arrived to learn tank gunnery, driving, maintenance, and radio work, and to climb training hills with names like "Misery," "Agony," and "Heartbreak." The post went through a huge building boom and bought more land to hold them.

In the spring and summer of 1942, the Navy used Fort Knox to solve a deadly problem. Engineers built an all-wood copy of the tank deck of a Landing Ship, Tank (LST) to test fans that could clear the poisonous exhaust of tanks running inside. The design worked, and more than 1,050 LSTs were built during the war, according to the Army's history of the post.

By the end of World War II the Army had 16 combat-tested armored divisions and about 65 separate tank battalions. From 1944 to 1946 Fort Knox also held a large prisoner-of-war camp for Italian and German prisoners, many of whom worked on the post. The war years are covered more broadly on the world history page.

Fort Knox had its own airfield, Godman Field, which served units such as the 387th and 391st Bombardment Groups during World War II. In 1945 it became the base of the 477th Bombardment Group, a unit of Black airmen trained at Tuskegee, Alabama.

Members of the 477th faced constant racial discrimination. In April 1945, at Freeman Field, Indiana, more than 100 of its officers were arrested for trying to enter a whites-only officers' club, an event known as the Freeman Field Mutiny, and the group was then moved back to Godman Field.

On June 21, 1945, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. took command of the 477th at Godman, and on July 1 he took command of Godman Field itself and all its units, making him the first Black officer to command a U.S. military air base. Davis had been one of the first five Black pilots to earn wings at Tuskegee and had led the 332nd Fighter Group in Italy. Their story is part of Black American history.

The group, renamed the 477th Composite Group, was preparing for combat in the Pacific when the war ended. It moved to Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio in 1946. In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated.

On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, the control tower at Godman Field and people across Kentucky reported a large, bright object in the sky. Four F-51 Mustang fighters of the Kentucky Air National Guard, flying nearby, were asked to take a look.

Captain Thomas F. Mantell Jr., a 25-year-old World War II veteran from Louisville, climbed after the object. His plane was not equipped with oxygen for high altitude. He lost consciousness, and his Mustang crashed near Franklin, Kentucky. Mantell was killed.

The crash became one of the most famous early "flying saucer" stories. The Air Force investigated it in its Project Sign and later Project Blue Book studies and concluded that Mantell was most likely chasing a high-altitude Navy research balloon from the secret Skyhook program. The P-51 Mustang and its history appear on the military aircraft page.

A historical marker near Franklin honors Mantell. The case is still cited in UFO literature, while the Air Force's balloon explanation is the one accepted by most historians who have studied the records.

After World War II, Fort Knox remained the center of Army armor training. In 1947 the 3rd Armored Division was reactivated there to run basic training and trained more than 300,000 soldiers, according to the Army's history. The Patton Museum opened on May 30, 1949, displaying armored vehicles and items linked to General George S. Patton Jr.

Under the Army Organization Act of 1950, armor and cavalry were combined into a single Armor Branch, with Fort Knox as its home. When the Korean War began that year, armor trainers from the post formed the 72nd Tank Battalion, which fought in Korea. On April 23, 1954, nearly 10,000 people gathered to welcome President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Fort Knox.

ROTC Basic Camp opened at Fort Knox in 1965. By 1968 more than one million trainees had completed at least one training program at Fort Knox since 1940. In 1980 the Army began fielding the M1 Abrams tank, and crews and instructors at Fort Knox helped bring it into service.

The post also had a moment in Hollywood: in 1980 Columbia Pictures filmed the military comedy Stripes at Fort Knox. During the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War, Fort Knox served as a mobilization center, preparing soldiers and units for Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Fort Knox's focus began shifting in 1992, when the headquarters of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command moved there. The command runs the Army's worldwide recruiting and now brings in tens of thousands of new soldiers each year.

The bigger change came from the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, a system Congress set up to decide which military bases to close or reorganize. Under its recommendations, the Armor Center and School left Fort Knox for Fort Benning, Georgia, to join the Infantry Center in a new Maneuver Center of Excellence. The move ended nearly 70 years as the home of Army armor.

In its place, Human Resources Command, Accessions Command, and Cadet Command moved to Fort Knox, joining Recruiting Command. An infantry brigade combat team, the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, and several Army Reserve headquarters also arrived.

In 2012 Accessions Command was inactivated, and Cadet Command took over running the post. On December 3, 2025, Recruiting Command became a three-star command that also oversees Cadet Command and the Army's initial entry training. In 2013 all ROTC Cadet Summer Training was consolidated at Fort Knox, where about 10,000 cadets now train each summer in what the Army calls its largest annual training event.