Mount Rushmore . It is the largest monument in the world. The sculpture represents the faces of four North American presidents; Thomas Jefferson , George Washington , Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln , which represent the first 150 years of the country’s history.
History
Mount Rushmore stands as a “sanctuary of democracy” in South Dakota . With it, the mandate of four presidents of the United States is commemorated, specifically, it typifies the first 150 years of the country’s history. It is a sculpture made of granite, by Gutzon Borglum . The history of Mount Rushmore dates back to 1923 . Another reason he chose that area was because of its location. The mountain “faces” the southeast, which meant it would have sunlight for most of the day. It was also the highest peak in the region and was made of granite, which made it more resistant to erosion. Borglum used an ancient Greek method to begin the work. The work began on As October 4 as 1927 .
The Election of George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , Theodore Roosevelt , and Abraham Lincoln it was very fast, since each one played a specific role in the preservation and expansion of their territory. Washington brought democracy to the United States, Thomas Jefferson devised the concept of having a “government of the people,” Abraham Lincoln was instrumental in ending slavery in America, and Theodore Roosevelt led in trade reforms. To make the sculpture on the mountain, first several scale models were made in plaster, which are still preserved and are the work of Gutzon Borglum. These models and the tools that were used to make them are still preserved in the Mount Rushmore Memorial Museum.
The monument is world famous and has been the scene of numerous films, the most famous appearance being the one that occurs in the Alfred Hitchcock film , ” With death on the heels .” Each face reaches 18 meters in height. Each nose measures 6 meters, the mouths measure 5 and ½ meters, and the eyes more than three meters each. It is estimated that, if they had bodies in scale, they would measure 140 meters in height. To sculpt them, 450,000, – tons of rock had to be removed with explosives, pneumatic drills and chisels. The 400 workers hired to build the monument were miners or quarry workers, and despite being used to explosives, they were not used to climbing a 1,800-meter mountain. Sometimes they had to be tied to an item similar to a swing, and one worker walked backward over the cliff while another loosed cable with a winch. The outlines of the faces were sculpted by drilling into grids and chipping out the rock with chisels.
The completion of the work took fifteen years, several of which were used to raise funds for the project. Borglum and Robinson, along with two senators from Dakota, convinced Congress to give them $ 250,000 to start sculpting. It eventually ended up costing almost a million dollars. The work continued during the 1930s, with pauses forced by lack of funds, or by adverse weather conditions. By 1941, the year in which the sculptor Borglum died, it was almost finished, taking over the works at his death Lincoln Borglum, his son, who since he was 15 years old was working on Mount Rushmore. The figures, built in plaster, represent a great tourist attraction in the area, especially since ten years ago the territory where they are built was remodeled, facilitating access to visitors, since we can comfortably access the statues and enjoy some magnificent views, especially from the statue of Abraham Lincoln . The place is a very popular place among Americans and has appeared in numerous American movies and series such as Superman II or Family Guy. Another curiosity is that the well-known pop group, Deep Purple used the image for the cover of the album In Rock.
Another of the charms that we find in the area is walking through the Mount Rushmore National Park, which has an area of more than 5 square kilometers, and where we can enjoy a wide and varied plant and animal offer. Access to the area is free, both to see the sculptures and to go to the National Park . The monument serves as a home to many animals and plants representative of the Black Hills of South Dakota . Geological formations in the interior of the region are also evident, including large outcrops of granite and mica. The rock formation is carved into a sacred site of the native Lakota tribe. A Memorial Caballo Loco , (Monument to Crazy Horse), begun in 1948, is currently being carved near South Dakota. Mount Rushmore was named a national monument on March 3 , 1925 .
In 1991 , celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the work, the government undertook a plan to restore it, for which it allocated a budget of forty million dollars. The care and cleaning of this Mount Rushmore sculpture still remains a challenge as it requires climbing the mountain to clean each of the sculptures. In 2008 the faces of Mount Rushmore were cleaned for the first time with pressurized water, maintaining the sculptures made free of charge by Alfred Kaercher Gmb & Co, a German company. However, the conservation of the monument is continuous by eliminating lichens and dirt, only with means of climbing. Today on Mount Rushmore it has new facilities, as well as sidewalks and footpaths, who will be able to see the majesty of these sculptures, no less than from Abraham Lincoln.
How the effigies were sculpted
Four gigantic faces look out to the horizon from the side of a granite mountain located in South Dakota , United States . If the bodies were also sculpted, each figure would be about 140 m tall. They are the faces of four former presidents of that country, carved on top of Mount Rushmore with pneumatic drills and dynamite by men perched on the edges of the slope. The imposing work took 14 years to complete, and was directed by John Gutzon Borglum, (image below) a famed Danish-born American sculptor.
The sculpted mountain is a national monument, and the four characters, chosen to represent the nation’s ideals, are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The idea to erect the monument came from the historian Doane Robinson in 1923 , who proposed that effigies of heroes such as Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill be sculpted on granite columns called the Needles located in the same area as Mount Rushmore. But Borglum considered that neither the columns nor the project were adequate, since he was convinced that the work should have national importance.
The sculptor John Gutzon Borglum built working models on a 1:12 scale (one inch in these amount to a foot on the rock). His son Lincoln Borglum measures the Jefferson model to make the transfer to Mount Rushmore. Once on top of it he helps to operate a machine to measure and mark the drill points. The monument was sculpted between 1927 and 1941 at a cost of $ 990,000, most of it federal funds. The sculpture itself took 6.5 years to complete, but work was slow due to financial problems in the early years, as well as climatic factors. Most of those who sculpted the faces were miners or quarry workers from the region, and during those 14 years about 360 employees worked in teams of 30 people on average.
Head planning
Borglum chose Mount Rushmore, 1,745 m high, for the fine grain of its granite, but it was still necessary to remove tons of stone to expose the proper rock; for Washington’s head about 9 m were roughed, and for Roosevelt’s about 37 m. During the work, some 450,000 tons of rock were removed, which are still at the foot of the mountain.
Borglum decided to sculpt head-to-head, beginning with Washington’s; he made of it a plaster model 1.5 m high (1/12 the size of the real one), on the top of which he fixed a flat plate marked in degrees. In the center of it and on a pivot he then mounted a 76 cm horizontal steel bar. long graduated in inches , and a plumb line also marked in inches suspended from the bar. By rotating the bar and moving the plumb bob to any point on the face, such as a nostril, the necessary measurements could be made.
To transfer the model measurements to the mountain, a similar mechanism 12 times larger was installed on top of the mountain, at the point chosen for the top of Washington’s head. Borglum called the device an indicating machine, and the men in charge of measuring, indicators.
Rock carving
After choosing the points, the rock was drilled to the depth marked by the indicator to place dynamite in the holes and blow about 15 cm. of the rock. The drilling had to be very precise, because a cut too deep would remove more stone and it would not be possible to replace it. Each driller worked tied to a leather seat that hung from a cable connected to a winch, with a 39 kg drill hanging from the same cable.
The winch operator was positioned at a point from which he could not see the driller, so a boy secured with a safety device was placed on the edge of the bluff to relay messages between them. Working while hanging about 30 feet from the top was not easy, so to apply enough pressure when drilling, drillers first had to reach for a length of chain and pass it behind the seat; then they fixed the chain with steel nails in the rock.
Heads of state faces four former presidents of the United States were carved on Mount Rushmore: (from left to right..) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln . The bits dull every 15 minutes, and hundreds of them had to be sharpened by a blacksmith every day. As the drillers moved from one point to another on the mountain, the dynamiters drove the charges into the holes; the detonations occurred twice a day: at lunchtime and at the end of the work day.
To cut and carve the stone to the final dimensions, the drillers made closely packed rows of small holes so that the final layer could be removed with wedges and steel hammers, and then smoothed the surface “with special drills. Borglum decided to sculpt head-to-head, beginning with Washington’s; he made of it a plaster model 1.5 m high (1/12 the size of the real one), on the top of which he fixed a flat plate marked in degrees.
Setbacks
Washington’s head was completed in 1930 , and work on Jefferson’s head immediately began. It began to the left of the first (from the observer’s perspective), but in 1934 a poor-quality rock layer appeared that forced the incomplete head to be destroyed and the sculpture relocated to the right of the Washington one .
As the rock on the other side had large fissures, 18 m had to be roughed out to achieve the proper layer, leaving just enough thickness between the boulder and the deep canyon behind it. But a fracture where the nose would go forced Borglum to alter the angle of the head, and other minor cracks were filled with a mixture of linseed oil, white lead, and powdered granite.
Jefferson’s head also has the only patch that was needed in the entire work: when sculpting the upper lip, a feldspar seam appeared that could not be carved, so it was removed and a gap of about 60 cm was left. long and 25 cm. deep. At the base of said cavity, two steel nails were placed to hold a granite plug fixed with molten sulfur.
The master touch
Each head is 18 m high and, on average, the nose of each is 6 m long, the mouth 5.5 m wide, and the eyes 3.4 m from one end to the other. To give character and expression to the faces on this scale, a master touch was necessary: Borglum gave the eyes a flash of life, leaving a granite column about 56 cm. long as a pupil, which the sunlight makes stand out against the shadow that it forms. Borglum died 6 of March of 1941 at the age of 73, shortly before the monument to stay over. The final touches were supervised by his son Lincoln, (left image) who as a teenager had worked as an indicator at the beginning of the project.
Curiosities
1. Charles E. Rushmore was a New York attorney who went to South Dakota to check property deeds in 1884/5. When he passed through the park he asked the name of the mountain and when he was told that it had none, he replied “From now on we will call it Rushmore.”
2. Thomas Jefferson was done twice. First the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, decided that Jefferson would go to George Washington’s right , but after 18 months he changed his mind and put him to the left after blowing up the first attempt.
3. George Washington’s nose is longer than that of other presidents.
4. It’s free. Or something like that. Entrance to the National Memorial Park is free but there is a charge of $ 10 to park the car.
6. The sculptor was related to the Klan. In the years before the work began, Gutzon Borglum participated in the Ku Klux Klan . Before working on Mount Rushmore he had spent years on a rock sculpture that was funded by the Klan. This commemorative work was symbolically destroyed and replaced by another work.
7. Celebrate independence the day before. For a long time, the 4th of July was celebrated with incredible fireworks on the mountain, picturesque shows the faces of the presidents colored by lights in the sky. However, a few years ago it began to be held on July 3 to avoid conflicts with neighboring communities that celebrate the next day. Will it be like the day of “almost independence”?
8. If you search for Mount Rushmore on Google Earth, you will find that it is almost impossible to find.
9. The total cost at the time was $ 989,992.32. That included workers and materials. With inflation, as of today, that sum equals $ 14.4 million. 84% of the funding was done by the federal government.
10. The Black Mountains, where Mount Rushmore is located, were originally lands belonging to the Sioux tribes. But in 1874 gold was found in the area and the Indians were displaced. In 1980 the Supreme Court analyzed the case and found that the tribes should be compensated for being evicted from the lands that had been constitutionally given to them. An offer in money, amounting to 105 million dollars, was rejected, as the indigenous people preferred to be able to take over the land again.