Designation: National Memorial
Date NPS designation declared: 3/03/1925
Date of my visit: 7/28/2009
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Happy President’s Day! In honor of the holiday, I thought I’d drag this oldie-but-goodie out of my archives. Mount Rushmore is a 60 foot sculpture of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota. The site was established in 1925 but construction was not completed until 1941. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum designed and oversaw the construction of the memorial. His son Lincoln took over for him in the final year of the project, after the elder Borglum died.
We later visited the Crazy Horse Memorial, not far from Mount Rushmore, where we actually gained a better understanding of what it took to create Mount Rushmore back in the days of dynamite and hand chisels. Construction on this monument to the Sioux Chief began in 1948 and has been conducted by multiple generations of the same family. Being privately funded, the work is slow, the project is the largest mountain sculpture in the world and will probably not be finished in my lifetime. The tour and the visitor’s center are well done and a must see if you’ve come all the way to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore.