Recently, Nick Clifford – the only living carver of Mount Rushmore – celebrated his birthday, which got us thinking about his magnificent monument and how it continues to stand the test of time. Since times are vastly different now than they were in the early to the mid-20th century, we wondered just what went into carving Mount Rushmore, which is how we uncovered these 12 incredible secrets you may have never known:
1. The idea for Mount Rushmore originally came about in the early 1920s, when then-state historian Doane Robinson was looking for a way to attract more visitors to South Dakota.
Robinson originally envisioned the monument carved upon the Needles, but Borglum pointed out that the thin mountains would not be nearly sturdy enough.
Advertisement
3. After securing funding from Congress, construction began and lasted from 1927 to 1941.
5. Since a whopping 450,000 tons of granite needed to be removed to complete the project, Borglum turned to dynamite, which is credited for eliminating more than 90% of the granite.
As if carving granite was not hard enough, each worker had to climb more than 500 steps to work each day!
8. During its 14-year production, Mount Rushmore's plan went through nine different changes, including the addition of the Hall of Records and the decision to forgo carving bodies below each president's head.
12. How were the four presidents selected? Geroge Washington was chosen because he was the founder of the country, Thomas Jefferson for signing the Louisiana Purchase and authoring the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln for his leadership in the Civil War, and Theodore Roosevelt for moving the country forward in both conservation and industrial development.
