Fort Knox, KY

Fort Knox is a United States Army installation in Kentucky, south of Louisville and north of Elizabethtown. The 109,000-acre base covers parts of Bullitt, Hardin and Meade counties. Fort Knox is named in honor of Henry Knox, Chief of Artillery in the American Revolutionary War and the first United States secretary of war. In 1931 a small force of the mechanized cavalry was assigned to Camp Knox to use it as a training site. The camp was turned into a permanent garrison in January 1932 and renamed Fort Knox. The Department of Defense Education Activity operates on-post public schools for all sections of the property. The secondary school, formerly Fort Knox High School, was built in 1958 and has undergone only a handful of renovations since then, including a new building which was completed in 2007.

That mix gives Fort Knox a clear local shape within Kentucky, with older layers still visible in current places. The local scoop is a place whose streets, landmarks, and institutions keep its earlier story close to the present. John Hunt Morgan and the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment of the Confederate Army raided the area before staging his infamous raid across Indiana and Ohio. After the Civil War, the area now occupied by the Army was home to various small communities.