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 Way Back When
Mount Rushmore
Way back when, on October 31, 1941, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was
completed. It took 14 long years of work to create the memorial.
Huge sculptures are carved into the mountain in Black Hills National Forest in southwestern South Dakota, U.S. The huge sculptures are representations of the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Each head is about 60 feet tall and is carved in granite on the southeast side of Mount Rushmore.
According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, the memorial was created to symbolize the first 150 years of the United States. The four heads represent the nations independence, democratic process, leadership in world affairs and equality.
The memorial was suggested by Doane Robinson, a historian with the South Dakota State Historical Society. It was designated a national memorial in 1925, and work began on the sculptures in 1927. American sculptor Gutzon Borglum was the lead sculptor, but it took six and a half years of actual carving by hundreds of workers using dynamite, jackhammers, chisels and drills. Much of the 450,000 tons of rock removed in the process remains in a heap at the base of the memorial.
The memorial cost nearly $1 million, and the federal government paid most of that. However, fund raising including collecting pennies from school children helped pay for some of the memorial. The mountain itself is 5,725 feet high and was named for Charles E. Rushmore, a New York lawyer, in 1885.
Source: National Park Service, www.nps.com; Mount Rushmore National Memorial
Society; Encyclopedia Brittanica, Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
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