Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a huge carving on a granite cliff called Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Mount Rushmore National Memorial shows the faces of four American Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The heads are 60 feet (18 meters) high. The height of the heads is to the scale of a human being 465 feet (142 meters) tall.
In 1924, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson approached the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum with a proposal of carving Black Hills rock formations into figures representing heroes of the American West. Borglum recommended that the sculpture focus on national figures, rather than those of regional interest. Borglum designed the Mount Rushmore memorial and supervised most of its work. Workers used models that were one-twelfth actual size to obtain measurements for the figures. The workers cut the figures from Mount Rushmore’s granite cliff by means of drills and dynamite. Work on the memorial began in 1927 and continued, with lapses, for over 14 years. Borglum died in 1941, before the memorial was completed, and his son Lincoln finished the work.
Mount Rushmore stands in the mountains 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Rapid City. The memorial rises 5,725 feet (1,745 meters) above sea level, and more than 500 feet (150 meters) above the valley. Thus, Mount Rushmore stands taller than the Great Pyramid of Egypt (see Pyramids ). The memorial is part of the National Park System .
