Monday, Jan. 25, 1937
Gold Storage
Last week a lady made news when she sent some 200 tons of bricks by parcel post from Philadelphia to a U. S. Army reservation some 31 mi. southwest of Louisville. Ky. The lady was the Director of the U. S. Mint, Nellie Tayloe Ross. The bricks were about $200,000,000 in gold, the Government's first bullion shipment to its great new fortress-vault at Fort Knox.
Last week's shipment was surrounded with the greatest precautions. Mint guards, Post Office inspectors, Secret Servants toiled all one night under the direction of Madam Director Ross carting the precious canvas-wrapped bricks from the Philadelphia Mint. By next morning they had their precious load packed neatly in four mail coaches of a special nine-car train that was manned by crack machine gunners concealed behind drawn blinds. With right of way cleared, the train chuffed off on its 530-mi. journey. Several hundred yards in front of the gold train went a dummy freight train.
The special arrived at Fort Knox about dawn. It was met by Brigadier General Daniel Van Voorhis, Fort Knox commandant, and a motorized unit of the Seventh U. S. Cavalry brigade. After concealing canopies were put up at the doors of the baggage cars, long Army trucks backed up to the spur track to be loaded with the 400-troy-oz. bricks. As each truck was loaded it was convoyed by two of the Seventh Cavalry's combat cars on its brief trip to the squat depository building. Few days later the process was repeated as $120,000,000 was shipped from the U. S. Assay Office in Manhattan.
Once inside the $560,000 building, each $14,000 brick became the direct responsibility of amiable Russell John Van Home, 45-year-old Mint employe who had spent 21 years in the San Francisco Assay Office when he was sent to the Fort Knox depository last July and given the title of Chief Clerk in Charge. Chief Clerk Van Home's gold is about as safe as human ingenuity can make it. The gold storage vault is a massive box 40 ft. by 60 ft., with top and sides of 25-in. steel and concrete. It rests on bedrock and is enclosed by a granite and concrete building topped with a bombproof roof. An invading army that lands on the Atlantic coast will have 600 rough miles to travel before it reaches Fort Knox. Common thieves will have to outwit and outfight a detachment of 24 Mint guards in "pill boxes" at the building's four corners and the entire Seventh Cavalry brigade outside. When 20 or more similar shipments are completed in the next few months, Chief Clerk Van Home will have some $6,000,000,000 in Government gold charged up to him at Fort Knox.
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