What Was at Fort Knox Before the Gold?
The film of this episode premieres October 4, 2026 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
Before the gold vault, before the tanks, there was a town on that ground. It was called Stithton, in Hardin County, Kentucky, near West Point, and in 1918 the War Department took 40,000 acres for an artillery training field and the town came down. Two years earlier, Lewis Hine had walked through it with a camera.
Transcript
A town called Stithton was here first
Fort Knox, June nineteen forty-two. There was a town on this ground, and the War Department told the Senate its people were relatively few.
The Secretary of War named it in his second paragraph. One at West Point, Kentucky — or near West Point, Kentucky. The town's name is printed right there on the page.
In nineteen eighteen the Army took the ground for an artillery training field, and the town came down.
Lewis Hine photographed Hardin County in 1916
Nearly everything known about what stood there first was photographed by one man, two years before the Army arrived.
Lewis Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee. He went county by county photographing children who worked instead of going to school.
He wrote what he found on the back of every print — the age, the grade, the hours, the father's name. The captions are why these pictures are evidence and not just photographs.
A boy driving a roller on his father's farm. West Point vicinity — that is ground the Army would take.
He shot it twice. The second negative is from the road, with the fence line and the far field in it.
Digging potatoes, his caption says. Fourteen and sixteen years old.
Then he walked out to a farm at the edge of the town. Tending the chicks. Sixteen-year-old girl.
The same farm, from further back, with the henhouse and the fence in the frame.
And the third negative he made there. A sixteen-year-old girl keeping house, a baby on her lap, a barefoot boy on the step behind her.
Her face, closer.
The Stithton school had 186 children in its district
Then he photographed the school in the town itself.
His caption is a piece of arithmetic. The school opened July twenty-fourth, with an enrollment of sixty — out of a hundred and eighty-six in district. Two children in three were not in that building.
But he wrote something else on that print, and it is the only compliment in his entire Kentucky series. A very pretty, well-built school. Best I have seen of its kind in the county.
He photographed the rest of the county that year
From here the pictures leave the reservation, and that has to be said plainly. The rest are Elizabethtown and Sonora — the same county, the same year, not the ground the Army took.
A child on a horse, minding the cattle.
Two children in the cart with the milk cans. Taking the milk to town for their father, a dairyman.
The Calvin Humphrey family, on the porch of a frame house.
The household in the doorway, closer.
And again, a second negative from the same spot.
The day's work, his caption calls this one.
William, Anna Belle and Garland Carter, against the boards of the house.
Demetra Jones was eleven. This is the house.
Her father told him: she's the only farm hand I got. She helps a lot in the field work and house work too. Is good in school — fifth grade.
Grubbing out the fence corners. A common scene in the Fall, he wrote. The boys are nine, twelve, fifteen and seventeen.
What a Hardin County farm looked like in 1916
And this is the home and farm of E. J. Hayward. Elizabethtown, not the reservation — just what a prosperous farm in that county looked like that year.
The house, closer.
And his fields behind it.
The Army took 40,000 acres in 1918
In nineteen eighteen the War Department took forty thousand acres in Kentucky. This is what went onto them — a crew running a new power line into Fort Knox.
The armistice had come in November. The war the camps were built for was over, and the Government was asking to pay for land it no longer obviously needed.
A senator asked to confirm the size of it. Senator McKellar: no, it is forty thousand acres in Kentucky. It is a hundred and thirty thousand at this camp.
The Secretary of War called them "relatively few"
Then the Secretary of War described the people who had been living on it.
There were scattered farmers and residents here and there over these tracts, though they were relatively few — but most of them had moved out, and abandoned their cultivation, and abandoned their homes.
These photographs are real color, by the way. Alfred Palmer shot them on color transparency film in June of nineteen forty-two. Nothing here is colorized.
Abandoned is the word in the record, and it does a great deal of work. It explains why nobody had to be paid very much.
And the ground "land of relatively low-acreage value"
A few sentences later he said the other half of it.
It is all land of relatively low-acreage value. Two diminishments in one paragraph — the people relatively few, the ground relatively low.
Senator Knox said the Government was "a debtor to those people"
One senator would not let the first half of that go.
If you take their land and dispossess them, and that was a lawful taking, the Government is a debtor to those people for the value of that land.
That was Philander Knox, a senator from Pennsylvania. No relation to the Henry Knox the camp is named for. The two names meeting here is a coincidence.
The same hearing created Camp Bragg and Camp Benning
The committee never settled what the land was worth. It had two other places to decide about that same morning.
The second was at Fayetteville, North Carolina. The third was a small arms training ground near Columbus, Georgia.
Fayetteville became Fort Bragg. Columbus became Fort Benning. The town near West Point became Fort Knox — three permanent posts out of one argument about handing land back.
For the North Carolina camp, the hearing printed the entire schedule of owners — every name, and the acres taken from each.
Line seventy-six. W. C. Dicks and Henrietta Dicks, a hundred and forty-two acres. And beside their name, in brackets: plat will not fit.
No such schedule was printed for Kentucky.
The names of the people who lived on this ground are not in this document anywhere.
The gold arrived in 1937
In nineteen thirty-seven the Treasury built the Bullion Depository on the reservation and the gold arrived. It is the only reason most people know the name.
Alfred Palmer photographed the same ground in 1942
By nineteen forty-two you could park a tank battalion on the fields Hine had photographed.
A tank commander, June nineteen forty-two, on the ground where the school had been.
118 cemeteries are still on the post
The people are still there. A hundred and eighteen cemeteries stand on Fort Knox today, holding more than three thousand five hundred graves.
They belonged to the families and the church communities that occupied the land before the installation did. That is the Army's own description, on the Army's own website.
Stithton was not the only town taken. Pitts Point had a Protestant burying ground.
And a Catholic one, on the same hill.
Some are fenced squares of headstones in second-growth timber, inside a live-fire range complex.
Others are mowed. They open to the families one day a year, on Memorial Day, from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon.
Everyone over eighteen shows a driver's license at one of six checkpoints. Every vehicle is searched. No metal detectors, and stay on the road.
One building from Stithton is still standing
One building from the town is still standing. The brick church went up in eighteen ninety-nine, and the Army's own history calls it the only recognizable building left from the town.
This is that church's graveyard. The oldest section has been in use since eighteen thirty-one.
How to check this yourself
All of this is on the open web, and the identifiers are in the description. The Secretary of War said relatively few. A hundred and eighteen graveyards is the correction — mowed and locked, by the Army that made them.
Sources
- *Land for Artillery Training Fields*, Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, 65th Congress, 3d Session, January 1919. Internet Archive `landforartillery00unit`, 236 pp., 300 dpi native scan. <https://archive.org/details/landforartillery00unit>; - p. 12 — Secretary of War Newton D. Baker: "Those three were, first, one at West Point, Ky., or near West Point, Ky., known as Stithton, which was intended to be a maneuver and practice ground for artillery…"; "The second was at Fayetteville, N. C., of like character with the one at Stithton… and the third was a small arms training ground near Columbus, Ga."; "Most, if not all of the farmers and residents — there were scattered farmers and residents here and there over these tracts, though they were relatively few — but most of them had moved out and abandoned their cultivation and abandoned their homes."; and "It is all land of relatively low-acreage value." - p. 27 — Senator Philander C. Knox (Pa.): "If you take their land and dispossess them, and that was a lawful taking, the Government is a debtor to those people for the value of that land." Followed immediately by Senator Fletcher: "You were proceeding to condemn?" - p. 30 — Senator Thomas: "I thought you said 140,000 acres?" Senator McKellar: "No; it is 40,000 acres in Kentucky. It is 130,000 at this camp." - pp. 97–98 — the schedule of owners for the North Carolina camp (Camp Bragg), printed name by name with deeded and measured acreage. Entry 76, "W. C. Dicks, Henrietta Dicks", carries the parenthetical "(plat will not fit)", 142 deeded / 208.8 as measured. ⚠️ No equivalent schedule was printed for the Kentucky camp. Every page of this volume was swept for a second "Owner. / Acreage." table; pp. 97–98 are the only ones. The episode states this as an absence, which is what it is. ⚠️ Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania is no relation to Major General Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War, for whom the camp was named. The script says so explicitly so the coincidence cannot be mistaken for a connection. ⚠️ This PDF is a LuraDocument recode: its text layer is at roughly half scale, anchored bottom-left, and is not in the page's coordinate space. Focus boxes are calibrated against the measured ink extent of the render (`research/fort-knox-stithton/build_feature.py`), and every box was read on a contact sheet before the plates were built.
- Lewis W. Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, Hardin County, Kentucky, 1916. Library of Congress, NCLC collection; masters ~5,000 px, public domain. - Stithton School: `LC-DIG-nclc-00561`, `LC-DIG-nclc-00466`. Hine's caption: "Stithton School opened July 24th with an enrollment of 60 out of 186 in district… The Stithton Public School is a very pretty, well-built school — best I have seen of its kind in the county." - The farm at Stithton: `LC-DIG-nclc-00465`, `-00558` ("Tending the chicks. 16 year old girl. Home of William Olliges, Stithton, Ky."), `-00559` ("16-year old girl keeping house"). - West Point vicinity: `LC-DIG-nclc-00423`, `-00424` (boy driving a roller), `-00560` ("Digging potatoes. 14 and 16 years old"), `-00425`. - Elizabethtown and Sonora vicinity — the same county and year, NOT on the ground the Army took, and the film says so on screen at scene 16: `-00403`, `-00404`, `-00405`, `-00409`, `-00417`, `-00418`, `-00420`, `-00421`, `-00422`, `-00467`, `-00487`. - `-00467`, Demetra Jones, 11, Sonora vicinity. Her father's words, from Hine's caption: "She's the only farm hand I got. She helps a lot in the field work and house work too. Is good in school — 5th grade." ⚠️ The Olliges family name is spelled here and in the video description but is never spoken — the voice rendered it as "theologist", and guessing at a real surname in front of an audience partly made of descendants is not worth the risk.
- Alfred T. Palmer, Fort Knox, Kentucky, June 1942. Library of Congress FSA/OWI colour file, `LC-DIG-fsac-1a35187` through `-1a35228` (42 frames; 16 used). Masters ~9,000 px. These are 4×5 Kodachrome transparencies — period colour. Nothing in this episode was colorized: no DDColor, no spotfix, and no altered-content disclosure, because none is owed. Scene 33 states this on screen. ⚠️ Two frames in this set carry period racial language in Palmer's own captions (`-1a35214`, `-1a35222`). Neither is used and neither caption is quoted.
- United States Bullion Depository, 1939. Treasury Department, Procurement Division, Public Buildings Branch. Library of Congress.
- U.S. Army Fort Knox, Cultural Resources Program, "Fort Knox Family Cemeteries." <https://home.army.mil/knox/about/Garrison/directorate-public-works/environmental-management-division/cultural-resources-management/fort-knox-family-cemeteries>; Retrieved 5 August 2026. "There are approximately 118 historic cemeteries at Fort Knox, most of which belonged to families or church communities that once occupied the land that now makes up the installation." "Memorial Day also marks the day of the year when the 118 cemeteries are open to the families of the more than 3,500 people buried on post." Visitation: 8 a.m.–3 p.m., six checkpoints, driver's licence and cell number for everyone 18 or older, all vehicles searched, no firearms, alcohol, glass, digging implements or metal detectors, and visitors must stay on the established road network. ⚠️ Press coverage of the same programme reports 116 cemeteries. The figure used on screen is 118, from the Army's own page, which is the primary source. Photographs (works of the U.S. Army, public domain): St. Patrick's, Owen, Pitts Point Protestant, Pitts Point Catholic, Snellen and Cedar Creek cemeteries. ⚠️ The New Grahampton photograph is deliberately unused: its only derivative is 746 px, which would be a 2.57× enlargement on a 1920 plate.
- U.S. Army Fort Knox, "Fort Knox Historic Driving Trail," spotter information (PDF, `home.army.mil/knox/1915/6399/1644/Historic_Map.pdf`): "The Main Post Chapel was constructed in 1899 to serve the (Roman) Catholic community in the town of Stithton and was originally named St. Patrick's Parish. When the Army acquired the town in 1918, the church was used as an auditorium until 1938 when it became the Main Post Chapel. It remains the oldest building on post and the only recognizable building from Stithton." The same document records that St. Patrick's Cemetery's "oldest section was used by St. Patrick's Church from 1831 to 1918."
- No pre-1918 topographic map of this ground was found. The USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection's earliest Elizabethtown sheet is 1938, after the taking, so no "before and after" map is shown and none is implied.
- No record of what the Stithton families were paid was located. The hearing discusses rent, an option to purchase and condemnation in general terms; it prints no Kentucky settlement figures.
- The population of Stithton is not stated on screen, because no census figure for the town as such was verified. The 186 children are Hine's count of a *school district*, which is not the same thing, and the script says "in district" every time.