Gutzon Borglum

Gutzon Borglum was an American sculptor who spent the last fourteen years of his life carving four presidents into a granite mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He directed the work at Mount Rushmore from 1927, with his son Lincoln, and chose the faces himself: Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln. Before Rushmore he had begun the Confederate carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia, and during those years he was deeply involved in Ku Klux Klan politics, a record the history of the memorial now includes.

He died in March 1941, months before work stopped, and his son finished the season and became the memorial's first superintendent; the visitor center is named for Lincoln Borglum. On our walk, the Sculptor's Studio holds his working model. Compare its ideal forms with what the granite allowed: flawed rock forced the whole Jefferson face to be moved.