Mount Rushmore
Interesting facts
- Behind Lincoln's head lies an unfinished Hall of Records, where a vault holding 16 enamel panels on American history was sealed in 1998.
- Jefferson was first carved on Washington's other side, but the rock there proved unstable, so the face was dynamited away and started again.
- The figures were originally meant to be carved from head to waist, but the money ran out before anything below the faces was attempted.
- Each of the four presidential heads is about 60 feet, or 18 metres, tall.
- The granite is so hard that it is estimated to erode only about one inch every 10,000 years.
- Not a single worker died during the fourteen years of carving, despite constant work with dynamite on the cliff face.
- The idea came from South Dakota's state historian Doane Robinson in 1923, who hoped a giant sculpture would draw tourists to the Black Hills.
- The mountain is named after Charles E. Rushmore, a New York lawyer who visited the area in the 1880s to check on mining claims.
- Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, months before the work ended; his son Lincoln saw the project through to its close.
- The entire monument cost US$989,992.32, equivalent to about $21.7 million in 2025.
Why it is worth it
The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan. Gutzon Borglum's first brief called for figures tied to the American West — Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were all part of early discussions — before Borglum redirected the project toward four presidents on the theory that it would draw broader national interest. That pivot is easy to miss now that the presidents feel inevitable, but the mountain could have told a very different story.
The scale of the physical work is easy to understate. Borglum and his son Lincoln oversaw roughly 400 workers, many of them former miners, over fourteen years from 1927 to 1941. They used dynamite to remove the bulk of the rock, then switched to jackhammers and hand tools for the finer carving, ultimately blasting and chiselling away about 450,000 tons of granite to reveal the faces underneath.
The mountain the sculpture is carved into has its own name and its own history that predates the carving by a very long time. The Lakota call the formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, the Six Grandfathers, and regard the Black Hills as sacred ground. The land passed out of Lakota control after treaties from the 1860s and 1870s were broken, so for many Native Americans the monument represents a double loss — land taken, then reshaped into a tribute to the government that took it. Borglum's own record adds another layer: he had documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan and used openly racist language about immigrants, facts that sit uneasily alongside the monument's status as a patriotic landmark.
Getting there
29 km from Rapid City. Rapid City Regional Airport (RAP) is about 37 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Needles 8.6 km · rock-formation
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a national memorial featuring a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, about 2 mi (3 km) southwest of Keystone, South Dakota, United States. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, named it the Shrine of Democracy, and oversaw the execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features 60-foot-tall (18 m) depictions of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively chosen to represent the nation's foundation, expansion, development, and preservation. Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually to the memorial park which covers 1,278 acres.
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