Gutzon Borglum worried that four faces would say nothing to anyone who found them without a language to read them by. His first answer was an inscription cut into the mountain, eighty by a hundred and twenty feet, giving the nine most important events in the history of the United States between 1776 and 1906. It failed twice over: the letters could not be read from the ground, and moving the Jefferson head took the space. So he went into the rock instead, planning a chamber eighty by a hundred feet in the wall of the small canyon behind the heads, reached by an eight hundred foot granite stairway and entered under a bronze eagle with a thirty eight foot wingspan. Blasting ran from July 1938 to July 1939 and drove a tunnel about seventy feet in before Congress directed that the remaining money go to the faces. Borglum died in March 1941 and the hole stayed raw for fifty seven years. On 9 August 1998, with four generations of the family present, sixteen porcelain enamel panels carrying the founding documents, an account of how the mountain came to be carved and who carved it, and a short history of the United States were sealed in a teakwood box inside a titanium vault, set into the granite floor of the entry and covered with a black granite capstone weighing twelve hundred pounds. It is not open to visitors.
Getting there
43.8789, -103.4592
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
