Visit Mount Rushmore
In the 1920s, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson got the idea that carving a sculpture in the Black Hills would attract visitors to the remote and thinly populated state — and bring in money, too. He was right.
Today about 2.5 million visitors travel to Mount Rushmore each year.
A monumental project
Mount Rushmore, a giant sculpture of four presidents, is at the top of a mountain towering about a quarter mile above the main viewing area.
The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum (GUT-son BOR-glum), sculpted the faces of the four presidents he thought did the most to make our country great: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Work began in 1927 and continued for 14 years. When Borglum died suddenly in early 1941, his son, Lincoln, took over and finished the project.
Carving the sculpture
Before he began the mountain sculpture, Borglum made smaller plaster models. Then he marked the mountain in red paint to show how many inches of rock workers needed to remove. The workers then blasted it away.
About 90 percent of the sculpture was carved by using dynamite. About 450,000 tons of rock were removed.
Workers next drilled to get to the final face, putting on the last touches with a hammer and chisel. The rock was then smoothed over.
About 400 workers helped carve the mountain. Most were miners, ranchers, farmers and teachers who lived in the area. They worked, dangling from harnesses, in weather ranging from hot 90-degree summers to days of 25 to 30 degrees below zero in winter. No worker was seriously injured during the whole project. Choosing faces
Borglum first planned to carve three presidents: Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson. When he realized there was room for one more president, Roosevelt was chosen because Borglum thought he helped working people and the environment.