The 'Secrets' of Mount Rushmore

1. George Washington has a piece of metal longer than your arm stuck in his eyeball.

A drill bit got stuck there during the carving. No one knows why the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, decided to leave it there. It is likely the sculptor was worried the eye would crumble if he tried to hard to pull it out.

You can actually see it in the picture above- see the little black line above his right eye? That's it!

2. There is a half-finished tunnel and time capsule behind the heads.

The sculptor originally envisioned a grand ‘Hall of Records’ where historical documents- like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence- could be secured and shown to tourists at the same time. He only made it about 70 feet into the mountain until work had to be stopped to focus on finishing the heads. In 1998, the National Park Service added a vault into the tunnel with 16 panels housed inside it, containing explanations of what Mount Rushmore is, as well as the texts of the documents the sculptor wanted preserved there.

3. Theodore Roosevelt was never supposed to be up there.

The original plan was to only carve three faces- Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln, from left to right. Jefferson was actually first carved on the left of Washington, until it was realized that the rock was unsuitable for carving, so Jefferson was dynamited off of the mountain and started over on the other side.

4. The faces were originally supposed to be full-sized busts, going all the way down to the President’s waists.

Due to time constraints, the onset of the Great Depression and World War II, and the death of the sculptor in 1941, Mount Rushmore was never really completed to Gutzon Borglum’s expectations.

5. No more faces will ever be added to the mountain- but not for the reasons you think.

Donald Trump made headlines for allegedly having his White House aides contact the South Dakota governor about adding additional President’s face to Mount Rushmore, but in 1941, the sculptors insisted that the remaining rock was too brittle to be carved. This belief has been backed up by multiple scientific organizations.

6. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though.

In 1937, 4 years before the heads were finished, a bill circulated in Congress about the possibility of adding Susan B. Anthony’s head. Ditto a bill for John F. Kennedy shortly after his assassination in 1963, and TWO for President Ronald Reagan (Once in 1985 and once in 1999).

7. The project was only supposed to take 5 years and cost around $100,000 dollars.

It ended up taking 14 years, from 1927 to 1941, and costing just north of a million dollars (today, that’s roughly 17 or 18 million dollars!)

8. Nobody died during the construction of Mount Rushmore!

There were a few close calls though- one worker blew his socks off with dynamite! There was also an accident with an out-of-control tram the workers used to transport people and equipment to the top of the heads.

9. The workers had a baseball team, the 'Rushmore Drillers'.

10. The last person to work on Mount Rushmore died in 2019.

Nick Clifford, who worked on the heads from 1938 to 1940, was paid 55 cents an hour for his work. He also fought in World War II, and was known around the Black Hills as a local celebrity!