Preserving our legacy: The 75th anniversary of Iron Mountain

As Iron Mountain celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2026, we apply our heritage preservation expertise to our own archival collection.

Customer:

Iron Mountain

Industry:

Corporate Archives

Challenge:

As Iron Mountain prepared to celebrate our own 75th anniversary, we needed to preserve and digitize our 75 years of history, which was scattered across more than 20 boxes of historical materials — including a rare can of mushrooms that links our company to its origin.

Solution:

Our archivists rehoused fragile documents, images, and film into archival-quality storage, and digitized key historical items for use in our 75th anniversary campaign. The images were ingested into AMPlify, our Asset Monetization Platform, so that they can be easily searched and shared for marketing campaign use. Archivists treated standout artifacts, like the sealed mushroom can from the 1930s-1950s, with specialized preservation techniques.

Our legacy of protecting what matters most

In 1936, Herman Knaust bought the original Iron Mountain site—a depleted iron ore mine with 100 acres of land—and started a mushroom farm; however, he soon realized the potential of the space to protect vital information from wars or other disasters. He had previously sponsored the relocation of many Jewish immigrants who lost their identities due to the loss of their personal records during WWII. By 1951, his mushroom farm had been fully converted into a records storage facility, and Iron Mountain, as we know it today, was formally founded.

To honor our 75th anniversary, archivists from our Media and Archival Services team conducted an internal audit of our historical records. The project sought to organize 20 boxes of historical mixed-media fragments into a cohesive, accessible archive that reflects our evolution from a mushroom farm to a global information management company.