BuzzFeed took readers to Butler County this week for a look at "The World’s Most Heavily Guarded Photo Archive," where 11 million historical photos are stashed away in a humidity-controlled fortress.
The Bettmann Archive is a 10,000 square foot vault buried 220 feet below ground in a former limestone mine near Boyers Township.
The archive is "a visual history of everything" from the 19th and 20th centuries and is home to original and iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, the moon landing, Elvis, JFK, and on.
It's named for Otto Bettmann (pictured below), a German photographer known as "The Picture Man" who fled Nazi Germany for the U.S., where he "virtually invented the image resource business."
 Ross Mantle writes:
With his encyclopedic knowledge of historical visuals, Bettmann figured out a cunning business, licensing images he amassed to editorial and advertising clients. Charles Clyde Ebbets' "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," the Apollo 11 moon landing, Malcolm X meeting Martin Luther King Jr., the Hindenburg's explosion, and a young Queen Elizabeth II (posing with one of her corgis) is only a small taste of the archive's famous images.
The Corbis Corporation, an image-licensing company formerly owned by Bill Gates, purchased the collection in 1995. Up to that point, the Bettmann Archive was located in New York City, however, the weather conditions there over time caused deterioration of the acetate negatives.
Read BuzzFeed's Q&A with Bettmann's sole archivists and see its exceptional photos of the place here.
There's more in that old limestone mine, a 200-acre storage facility used by government agencies (often confidentially), Fortune 1,000 companies, record companies, and almost every major motion picture studio.
National Geographic, which has its own archives there, offers an eerie, four-minute tour of the "underground city" here.
The network says Cold War anxiety in the 1950s led the defense industry to urge its largest contractor at the time, U.S. Steel, to find a "hardened location" to preserve its vital records in the event of a nuclear attack.
The company, with operations based in Pittsburgh, owned dozens of blast-proof mines, including the one in Boyers Township, which it used to supply limestone for railway and skyscraper projects.
U.S. Steel employee Larry Yont saw a bigger opportunity to position the mine as a document-storage facility and nuclear holocaust-proof shelter for the country’s business elite. Yont bought the property in 1954 and launched National Underground Storage, which was purchased in 1998 by the Boston-based company Iron Mountain for $39 million.
Iron Mountain, which gave the mine the same name, was founded in 1951 by Herman "Mushroom King" Knaust, who made a fortune growing 'shrooms in old upstate New York mines before the market shifted overseas. Suddenly, he needed a new use for the subterranean chambers.
According to the company, Knaust’s decision in 1945 to sponsor the relocation of Jewish immigrants — who lost identities and personal records during WWII — is what spurred the idea to start protecting vital information from wars or other disasters in abandoned mines.
In a 2013 piece for New Yorker magazine, Joshua Rothman writes:
It’s hard to say what Iron Mountain might look like a half-century from now. Over the past few decades, two factors have driven the company’s rapid growth: the advent of personal computing, which led to an explosion in the production of paper documents, and tougher regulations, which have compelled companies to keep those documents for longer periods.
Rothman adds: "Even digital storage is still, ultimately, physical."
—Colin Deppen, PA Local editor | 
