SEPTEMBER 23
1974•Fort Knox Opens Gold Vaults to Congress and Press
2010•James Buchanan Presidential $1 and First Spouse Medal Set
2025•2025-S Silver Eagle Proof Released
Fort Knox Opens Its Gold Vaults to Congress and the Press
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On September 23, 1974, one of the most secretive federal facilities in America opened its doors for an extraordinary inspection. Members of Congress and journalists entered the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, to see the nation’s gold reserves for themselves.
The visit was intended to answer a question that had moved from rumor into public controversy: was the gold supposedly stored at Fort Knox actually there?
For decades, the depository’s intense security and near-total ban on visitors had helped make “Fort Knox” a synonym for something impossibly secure. But secrecy also encouraged suspicion. By 1974, published allegations claimed that some or all of the gold had disappeared. Treasury Secretary William E. Simon responded by inviting members of Congress to inspect the reserves, while Mint Director Mary Brooks opened the event to the press.
The result was one of the rarest episodes in Fort Knox history. The vaults were opened to outsiders, journalists were permitted to photograph inside, and federal officials disclosed that Fort Knox held 147.4 million fine troy ounces of monetary gold.
Fort Knox Was Never a Mint
Despite its close association with American money, the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox is not a coin-producing mint.
Its purpose is storage and security.
The facility stands next to the U.S. Army installation at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and has been administered by the United States Mint. It was built during the 1930s as the federal government accumulated enormous quantities of gold.
The first gold arrived there in 1937.
Rather than striking coins, the depository protects bullion and other valuable government property behind extraordinary physical and procedural security.
Why So Much Gold Went to Kentucky
The Fort Knox depository emerged from the dramatic monetary changes of the Great Depression.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration restricted private monetary gold ownership as part of its response to the banking crisis. Congress followed with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, transferring monetary gold to the United States Treasury and changing the official price of gold.
As Treasury holdings expanded, the government needed secure storage outside traditional coastal financial centers.
Fort Knox offered a protected inland location near a major Army installation.
The Treasury began building the depository in 1936, and shipments started the following year.
The movement of America’s gold to Fort Knox was itself remarkable.
According to the United States Mint, the first shipments arrived in 1937 by U.S. Mail.
They were hardly ordinary postal deliveries. The transfers involved heavy security and transported vast quantities of bullion into the new Kentucky vault.
By the end of 1941, Fort Knox held a record 649.6 million ounces of gold.
That enormous accumulation helped establish the depository’s legendary reputation.
During World War II, the depository protected objects whose value could not be measured simply in dollars.
The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights were moved from Washington to Fort Knox for safekeeping in 1942.
They remained there until 1944.
Other historically significant objects have also been protected at Fort Knox, including a copy of Magna Carta and the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen and associated regalia.
The building therefore became not only a bullion vault but, in extraordinary circumstances, a national safe.
Almost nobody was allowed inside.
The Mint describes Fort Knox as operating under a rigid no-visitors policy. Details of its security procedures were deliberately limited, and no single person was supposed to know every procedure required to open the vault.
That secrecy was part of the security system.
It also created fertile ground for rumors.
When the government says that hundreds of millions of ounces of gold sit behind doors almost nobody can see through, some people inevitably ask whether the gold is really there.
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1943 Inspection
Before 1974, the most famous outsider to inspect the vault was President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt visited on April 28, 1943.
Mint Director Mary Brooks later described his visit as the only previous occasion on which a gold vault had been opened for inspection by anyone other than authorized personnel.
For more than three decades afterward, the depository remained effectively closed to outsiders.
By the summer of 1974, allegations about missing Fort Knox gold had attracted public and congressional attention.
Tabloid reports claimed that the reserves had been removed or tampered with. Questions reached members of Congress, and Representative Philip M. Crane of Illinois became one of the legislators pressing the issue.
The claims were not proof that the gold was missing. But the combination of sensational allegations and Fort Knox’s secrecy created a public-relations problem for the Treasury.
The government could continue saying that the gold was secure—or it could let selected outsiders see it.
Treasury Secretary William E. Simon chose the second approach.
He invited members of Congress to inspect the gold.
Mint Director Mary Brooks announced the visit in a September 20 press release, describing it as a departure from the government’s long-standing policy of excluding visitors.
Brooks connected the inspection to President Gerald Ford’s stated policy of greater governmental openness.
The press was invited as well.
September 23, 1974
On September 23, the congressional delegation and journalists entered Fort Knox.
For the first time, photography was permitted inside the depository during such an inspection.
The visitors saw stacks of gold bars inside selected vault space.
Contemporary reporting described tens of thousands of bars stacked from floor to ceiling and valued, at the government’s official gold price, at hundreds of millions of dollars in the compartment viewed.
The spectacle was exactly what the government intended: visible evidence that Fort Knox was not an empty building.
Mary Brooks, Director of the Mint from 1969 to 1977, played a central role in the event.
Her September 20 announcement stated that inviting the press would help clear away the mystery and reassure Americans that their gold was intact and safe.
That statement reveals the real purpose of the inspection.
It was not simply a ceremonial tour. It was a response to distrust.
The government was using transparency—however limited—to counter claims that secrecy concealed missing reserves.
The Mint’s official announcement supplied unusually detailed figures.
As of the inspection, the total monetary gold stock of the United States was reported as 276.0 million fine troy ounces.
At the statutory valuation of $42.2222 per fine troy ounce, that gold carried an official book value of approximately $11.7 billion.
Fort Knox was the largest single storage location.
It held 147.4 million fine troy ounces in 13 vault compartments, officially valued at approximately $6.2 billion.
Fort Knox has become so famous that it is easy to imagine all U.S. government gold being stored there.
It was not.
The 1974 Mint statement listed substantial holdings at several other locations. The Denver Mint held 54.9 million fine troy ounces, while the New York Assay Office held 54.1 million. The San Francisco Assay Office held 10.6 million.
Additional amounts were held in special custody at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at the Bank of England, Bank of Canada, and other locations.
Fort Knox was the largest repository, but it was one component of a broader federal gold-storage system.
Book Value Was Not Market Value
The official value quoted for the gold can be misleading without context.
The government valued its monetary gold at the statutory rate of $42.2222 per fine troy ounce.
That was an accounting value, not necessarily what the gold could command in the open market.
By 1974, the international monetary system had changed dramatically. President Richard Nixon had ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold for foreign monetary authorities in 1971, effectively ending the central mechanism of the Bretton Woods gold-dollar system.
Market gold prices could therefore be far above the Treasury’s official book value.
One important distinction is often lost in retellings of the Fort Knox visit.
The September 23 congressional and press inspection was not itself a complete audit of all Fort Knox gold.
It was an inspection.
The Mint’s September 20 announcement explicitly stated that a special settlement, or audit, was scheduled to begin on September 24.
That work involved the General Accounting Office and Treasury agencies, along with Mint technicians trained to weigh and assay bullion.
Federal records later described the September-October 1974 effort as a partial audit of Fort Knox holdings.
The General Accounting Office participated with Treasury officials.
According to later Treasury material preserved by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRASER archive, approximately 21 percent of the gold bars stored at Fort Knox were covered by the initial audit.
The objectives were broader than merely looking at bars. Auditors sought to verify inventory records and examine the adequacy of accounting controls.
No discrepancies were reported in the Treasury records for the gold examined.
A Continuing Audit Program Followed
The 1974 controversy had a lasting administrative consequence.
Federal officials established a continuing program for auditing U.S.-owned gold held at government depositories.
The work proceeded cyclically because physically verifying enormous quantities of bullion was labor intensive.
By September 1981, Treasury records reported that more than 212.7 million fine troy ounces—over 80 percent of then-current U.S.-owned gold—had been covered through the continuing audit process and earlier examinations.
The 1974 inspection therefore became part of a larger effort to demonstrate that official bullion records could be independently checked.
A standard bar at Fort Knox is substantial.
The Mint describes a typical bar as approximately seven inches long, three and five-eighths inches wide, and one and three-quarters inches thick.
It weighs about 400 troy ounces—roughly 27.5 pounds.
The exact fineness of individual bars can vary, so their fine-gold content and accounting value are determined accordingly.
Thousands upon thousands of such bars create the iconic stacks associated with the depository.
Descriptions of “the public’s gold” can create another misconception.
The bullion is an asset of the United States government, held by the Treasury and recorded under federal accounting rules.
Citizens cannot redeem ordinary paper currency for bars from Fort Knox, nor is the facility a bank vault containing individually allocated deposits for Americans.
Its importance is monetary, fiscal, historical, and symbolic.
Once the congressional inspection ended, Fort Knox returned to its normal closed status.
For decades, the 1974 visit remained the last major opening of the vault to outsiders.
The depository continued to inspire conspiracy theories, movies, books, and popular mythology precisely because so few people had seen the interior.
Its name became shorthand for extreme security: something “locked up like Fort Knox” was assumed to be nearly impossible to reach.
The Vault Opens Again in 2017
More than four decades passed before another exceptional visit.
On August 24, 2017, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other officials entered the depository.
The Mint described it as the first visit by non-authorized personnel since 1974.
The rarity of that event underscores just how unusual September 23, 1974 had been.
The Mint currently reports Fort Knox holdings of approximately 147.3 million fine troy ounces of gold.
That figure is strikingly close to the 147.4 million ounces reported for the facility in 1974.
The Mint states that, apart from very small quantities removed for purity testing during audits, gold has not been transferred into or out of the depository for many years.
Fort Knox therefore remains one of the largest concentrations of government-owned gold in the world.
September 23, 1974 is memorable not because gold arrived at Fort Knox or because a new coin was struck, but because the wall of secrecy surrounding America’s most famous bullion vault briefly opened.
Congressional representatives and journalists were allowed inside in response to persistent claims that the nation’s gold was missing.
The United States Mint reported 147.4 million fine troy ounces stored there in 13 compartments. Photographs were permitted. The following day, federal auditors began a formal examination that became part of a continuing program of gold-stock verification.
For numismatic history, the event offers a reminder that the United States Mint’s responsibilities extend far beyond producing coins. The institution has also been entrusted with custody of one of the nation’s most famous physical assets.
Fort Knox derives much of its mystique from the fact that the public almost never gets to look inside.
On September 23, 1974, for one extraordinary day, Congress and the press did.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2010 — James Buchanan Presidential $1 and First Spouse Medal Set — Sales opened for the James Buchanan Presidential $1 Coin and First Spouse Medal Set.
2025 — 2025-S Silver Eagle Proof Released — The U.S. Mint opened sales for the 2025 San Francisco American Eagle one-ounce silver proof coin.