Maine had been humiliated by the British twice, so it built this out of granite.
Fort Knox stands on the western bank of the Penobscot River in Prospect, about five miles from the river mouth. It went up between 1844 and 1869, and it was the first fort in Maine built entirely of granite. Everything before it had used wood, earth and stone.
The motive was memory. Local recollection of Maine being humbled by the British during the Revolution, and again during the War of 1812, fed a lasting anti-British feeling in the eastern part of the state. The Penobscot Expedition of 1779 had aimed at forcing the British out of what they called New Ireland, and it had gone badly. A permanent granite fortification guarding the river was the answer eventually settled on.
It is named for Major General Henry Knox, the first US Secretary of War and Commander of Artillery during the Revolutionary War, who spent the end of his life at Thomaston, not far away.
Maine's tourism guide calls it the state's largest historic fort and one of the best-preserved examples of mid-19th-century coastal defence in the country, which matches the official record: as a virtually intact example of a granite coastal fortification it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 and was declared a National Historic Landmark on 30 December 1970.
There is a bonus most visitors do not expect. Fort Knox is the entry point for the observation tower of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, opened to the public in 2007. So you get a granite fort built against an invasion that never came, and then you go up and look at the river it was watching.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
