What remains is a roughly hewn, 68-foot-long tunnel, that is 12-feet wide and 20-feet high. To Borglum's great dismay, work had to be halted in July 1939 when funding became so tight that Congress, worried that Mount Rushmore would never be finished, mandated that all work had to be focused on only the four faces. Starting in July 1938, workers blasted away granite to make the Hall of Records. Aluminum scrolls detailing important events in American history would be proudly displayed and important documents would be housed in bronze and glass cabinets. Inside was to be elaborately decorated with mosaic walls and contain busts of famous Americans. The Hall of Records was to be a large room (80 by 100 feet) carved into Mount Rushmore that would be a repository for American history.įor visitors to reach the Hall of Records, Borglum planned to carve an 800-foot-high, granite grand stairway from his studio near the base of the mountain all the way up to the entrance, located in a small canyon behind Lincoln's head. When Borglum had to scrap his plans for an Entablature, he created a new plan for a Hall of Records. The entrance to the Hall of Records at Mount Rushmore. Ultimately, the Entablature was discarded, partly because the words would not be legible from a distance and partly due to a lack of funds. The location for the proposed Entablature changed a number of times, but the idea was that it would appear somewhere next to the carved images. Coolidge was very upset and refused to write any more. However, when Coolidge submitted his first entry, Borglum disliked it so much that he completely changed the wording before sending it to the newspapers. The Entablature was to contain nine historical events that occurred between 17, be limited to no more than 500 words, and be carved into a giant, 80-by-120-foot image of the Louisiana Purchase.īorglum asked President Calvin Coolidge to write the words and Coolidge agreed. The words were to be a very short history of the United States, carved into the rock face in what Borglum called the Entablature. However, with money scarce during the Great Depression and WWII looming, Congress decided that only the four heads already in progress would continue.īorglum had originally planned to carve more than just presidential figures into Mount Rushmore-he was going to include words as well. A bill requesting Anthony was even sent to Congress. In 1937, a grassroots campaign emerged wanting to add another face to Mount Rushmore-women's rights activist Susan B. However, there was much debate as to who the fourth face should honor. Borglum wanted Teddy Roosevelt for his conservation efforts and for building the Panama Canal, while others wanted Woodrow Wilson for leading the U.S. presidents seemed obvious choices: George Washington for being the first president, Thomas Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence and for making the Louisiana Purchase, and Abraham Lincoln for holding the country together during the Civil War. Borglum wanted Mount Rushmore to become a "Shrine of Democracy," as he called it, and he wanted to carve four faces on the mountain.
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