BOYERS, Pennsylvania — People around here are used to the trucks that deliver paperwork to the old Pennsylvania limestone mine. Here, over 700 locals work as employees of the Office of Personnel Management processing the retirement papers of federal government workers.
Everyone around here knows of its existence. In fact, a lot of people around here either work there or have a family member who works there.
Once upon a time, the mines and quarries around Boyers were filled with limestone and coal, which powered and built the country, like hundreds of places across Pennsylvania. Work in those mines provided families with a decent wage and a reason to stay rooted in the region.
In the 1950s, as these mines emptied of their natural resources, local elected officials across the state, and across the country for that matter, looked for ways to utilize them so that people wouldn’t lose their jobs and have to relocate.
In 1951, during the early, fear-driven days of the Cold War, the city council in Scranton, Pennsylvania, proposed using former mines to construct underground parking lots. The argument was that they could serve as bomb shelters in the event of an enemy atomic attack.
In 1960, the Cleveland Plain Dealer detailed the use of a worked-out limestone mine in Western Pennsylvania that National City Bank used as a bank storage vault. It was constructed as part of a detailed plan to ensure the continuity of their banking operation in the event of a catastrophe, including a nuclear attack.
That bank became one of the few financial institutions in the United States to obtain underground bomb-proof storage facilities. They were to use the same mine located in Butler County, about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh.
At that time, the mine was operated by the National Storage Company, which already had other similar clients. Many of them were major, blue-ribbon industrial corporations in the Pittsburgh area and other sections of the eastern U.S.
Today, that former limestone mine is Iron Mountain, which merged with the longtime owner of the National Storage Company or National Underground in 1998.
The facility is located right off of state route 308 in Boyers, a Butler County village located 20 miles from the Butler Farm Show Complex where President Donald Trump was shot on July 13, 2024.
The Butler Farm Show Complex is the same place where Elon Musk took the stage with Trump for the first time to voice his support for the president.
On Tuesday, Musk, the owner of X and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, brought attention to the facility during an appearance with Trump in the Oval Office. His comments implied that this mine might need examining.
“All that retirement paperwork is manual on paper,” Musk said in a rare public appearance in his role as an adviser to the president. “It’s manually calculated. They’re written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine and, like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.”
Musk is not the first person to beg that question. Both the Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama administrations questioned the efficiency and lack of automation in processing thousands of case files, moving them from cavern to cavern, one line at a time.
As one local, who asked for their name not to be used because half of their family works at the mine, noted, “Back in the ’50s, the concern was nuclear attack. Today, the concern is cyberattack. It is all about the protection and preservation of these documents.”
Some consider the place an oddity. And of course, there is the always-entertaining speculation that a bunker for the president has been located deep within it since the Cold War — a speculation without evidence.
There are locals who also say there are ghosts within the massive series of vaults and mines, which is common local lore.
When Musk posted on X about the existence of a mine full of paperwork, the social media platform lit up in reaction. Its existence around here is as commonly known, the same as who makes the best pizza in the area.
The jobs they hold at the facility do more than just provide an income — they also keep generations of families intact who are deeply rooted in the area. That, in turn, provides a tax base for the school district and the local townships, keeping the rural region thriving.
“There are 700 jobs here, around 300 of them are OPM, but the rest are government contract jobs that revolve around OPM, with the overwhelming majority of those jobs held by citizens of small towns in Butler County,” the longtime resident said.
“If this place is nixed and 70% of the jobs are gone, it will devastate both northern Butler County and southern Butler County,” he said. “We have no comparable jobs.”
For those who are hoping this will pull Trump supporters away from him because of the mention of the mine, there is no evidence of that yet.
“I think Mr. Musk is misinformed because the workers tell me they don’t just deal in manila envelopes. A lot of their work is digitalized, no question,” he said, adding, “I think the job of DOGE is to be skeptical about everything, and in the end, they will find that this facility isn’t a place of excess.”
Trump won Butler County by a whopping 65 percentage points.
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), of Butler County, who has toured the mine several times, said he, too, believes this will all work out in the end.
“Once there is more nuance and context provided as to what exactly is done here and why it is done the way it is done,” Kelly said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“The space is utilized not just for its size, but the process is also for safety and security,” Kelly said. “During the Cold War, it was considered safe from external attacks. Now, during the digital age, it keeps important government documents safe and preserved if there was a cyberattack.”
Kelly said he understands that the move now is to do everything online. “Everything has to be digitalized. Everything has to be done quickly. All I’m saying is, you know what? There’s a reason why things have a long lifespan in something like the mine. That is a very safe storage space for these documents.”
On Tuesday, Musk bluntly admitted he would get things wrong from time to time.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected, so nobody can bat 1.000,” he said, promising to swiftly correct errors, with the same going for the Department of Government Efficiency.
“We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly,” Musk said.
Kelly says the root of what Musk is doing is good, old-fashioned getting to the root of what is the federal bloated bureaucracy.
“That is not what is happening at Iron Mountain, but you don’t know that until you ask,” Kelly said.
The limestone excavated here was owned and used by U.S. Steel from 1902 to 1952. It was used in the then-booming steel mills located all around Pittsburgh.
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When it regained new life as a storage facility in the late 1950s, the stone walls of the Boyers mine were painted silver and the floor was blacktopped with wide corridors as armored trucks drove through the miles of underground roadway to each individual vault.
The Times-Tribune wrote in 1960 that the mine was entirely air-conditioned and had electric heaters, humidity-controlled equipment, and generators for producing power. They also wrote that it contained escape hatches and alternate entrances and exits, but their locations were kept secret. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research and education organization, recently reported that Iron Mountain expanded its data center, known as WPA-1, inside the mine.