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The 20th century's most famous sculpture grouping, Mount Rushmore depicts the heads of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln, blasted out of the face of the mountain between 1927 and 1941 by teams of workers under the direction of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, at a total cost of just under $1 million. The heads are carved to the proportion of men 465' tall. Originally, Borglum planned to carve the bodies from the waist up, but only Washington's lapels were completed. There's no more room for additional figures, though grandstanding politicians never stop proposing them.
Mt. Rushmore got its name from a joke. In 1885 a young New York lawyer named George Rushmore was vacationing in what was then Dakota Territory. Pointing to the then-unnamed peak, he asked his guide what it was called. "I call it Mount Rushmore," joked the guide...and the name stuck. Forty years later, when sculptor Gutzon Borglum selected the mountain for his carvings, the astonished George Rushmore contributed $5,000 toward the project.
Mount Rushmore heads. Thanks to the super-zoom lens on my digital camera, here are close-ups of each of the Presidents:
Side view of George Washington's head, from a road near the mountain
Mount Rushmore from a distance
Further reading:
Rex Allen Smith, The Carving of Mount Rushmore (1994)
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