Fort Knox is a U.S. Army post which occupy an area of 441 km.sq and currently holds the Army human resources Center of Excellence, being also one of only three Army posts (along with
Fort Campbell, Kentucky and
Fort Sam Houston, Texas) that still have a high school located on-post. It was the home, for nearly seventy years (1940-2010), of the U.S. Army Armor Center, and the
U.S. Army Armor School (now at
Fort Benning), being used by both the Army and the
Marine Corps to train crews on the
M1 Abrams main battle tank. Fortifications were erected near the site in 1861 (
Fort Duffield), but the construction for a permanent training center was started only in July 1918, the new camp being named after
Henry Knox, the Continental Army's chief of artillery during the
Revolutionary War and the country's first
Secretary of War. Here is also the
General George Patton Museum.
On the other hand, The
U.S. Department of the Treasury has maintained the Bullion Depository on the post since 1937. It is a fortified vault building (in the postcard) located adjacent to Fort Knox, used to store a large portion of U.S. official gold reserves (4,578 metric tons of gold bullion, i.e. roughly 3% of all the gold ever refined throughout human history) and occasionally other precious items belonging or entrusted to the federal government. Even so, it is second in the U.S. to the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in
Manhattan, which holds 7,000 metric tons.
About the stamp
The stamp is a Global Forever First-Class Mail International one ($1.10), about which I wrote
here.
References
Fort Knox - Wikipedia
Fort Knox - Official website
sender: The Crouchers (direct swap)
sent from Carrollton (Kentucky / United States), on 04.12.2013
No comments:
Post a Comment