For as long as people have had possessions, we have needed a way to store and protect them. In Ancient times, storage was mainly used to protect and preserve the most prized possession: food. Since Ancient civilizations lacked refrigerators they needed to come up with a way to preserve their meats. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt they used salt to remove the moisture from the meat to preserve it. It was then stored in clay pots. These clay pots become the ancient world’s first storage unit. Along with meat, grains like wheat and barley were a valuable commodity that needed to be properly stored and protected from insects and small rodents. Beginning in 8500 BC they built above-ground buildings out of pottery known as granaries. According to Wikipedia, granaries were used in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Great Britain. Of course, we now know the ones used in modern farming as grain elevators.
Once food storage no longer became as great of a concern, different kinds of possessions became important to people and storage was needed. In the late 19th century the British changed the concept of self storage when banks started to offer secure holding facilities to the British aristocracy who used to travel for months on end and didn’t want to leave their precious items unattended.
Then in 1906, Martin Bekin, who is considered the pioneer of modern day self-storage saw a need for storage facilities for the mass amounts of immigrants arriving to the United States. Immigrants needed a place to store their belongings while they searched for homes and places to permanently put down roots, so he built the first storage warehouse. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the first storage units as we know them today opened up. These facilities were the first of their kind because they gave the tenant exclusive access to the storage space.
We’ve come a long way in terms of the accessibility and the convenience of storage units and while our personal prized possessions have certainly evolved through the years, one thing remains the same: the need for a secure storage space. Dollar Self Storage has convenient locations in California, Arizona and Nevada and we would love to help you store your things!