Brief History of Mount Rushmore USA

Why Was Mount Rushmore Constructed?

     In addition to the Statue of Liberty and the White House, the United States (US) has a distinctive and famous icon, namely the carvings of the faces of the four American presidents on Mount Rushmore. Not only is it a symbol of the greatness of the land of Uncle Sam, Mount Rushmore also has a number of unique histories that not many people know about.

                                                          Image Source: Wikimedia.org

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture of a face carved into the granite of Mount Rushmore, a batholith in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota, United States. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the designs of the sculpture and oversaw the execution of the project from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum.

  Mount Rushmore features a 60-foot (18 m) statue of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) . The memorial garden covers 1,278.45 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km) and 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.

South Dakota historian Doane Robinson is credited with understanding the idea of carving the faces of famous people into the Black Hills region of South Dakota, in order to promote tourism in the region. Robinson's original idea was to carve the Needles;

However, Gutzon Borglum turned down the Needles because of the poor quality of the granite and strong opposition from Native American groups. They settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing the southeast for maximum sun exposure. Robinson wanted it to feature Western American heroes like Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Borglum decided the statue had to have a wider appeal and chose four presidents.

After securing federal funding through the sponsorship of US Senator Peter Norbeck (Mount Rushmore's great political patron), construction began in 1927, and the presidential face was completed between 1934 and 1939. After Gutzon Borglum's death in March 1941, Lincoln Borglum's son, took over. position as a construction project leader.

Every president was originally sculpted from head to waist. A lack of funding forced construction to end on 31 October 1941.

Mount Rushmore has become an iconic symbol of the United States of America, and It attracts more than two million travelers each year.

The project's architect Borglum had a vision for Mount Rushmore that went beyond the heads of four presidents. He wanted to build a room called the Hall of Records behind Lincoln's head that would be used to keep some of America's most important documents.

The room measures 80 feet (24 meters) high and 100 feet (30 meters) long. He envisioned there would be a brass cupboard that would hold the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Unfortunately, these plans were never completed despite workers having built a 70-foot-long space.

Borglum died in the middle of the project and the money ran out so the project was abandoned.

In 1998, a total of 16 porcelain panels explaining the history of the United States and Mount Rushmore were placed in the hall. This hall is not open to the public and is only meant to be a time capsule.

The local Native Americans opposed the creation of a statue of Mount Rushmore to this day.

During the construction of the Mount Rushmore statue, the Native American Lakota Sioux strongly opposed the project for having to 'cut up' the sacred Black Hills. They oppose putting the faces of presidents who support the killing of Native Americans. But despite these criticisms, the site was still established and is still considered controversial today.