Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a granite mountainside sculpture in the Black Hills of South Dakota, carved with the 60-foot-tall faces of four American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. The project was originally proposed by the South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson to promote tourism, and it was designed and directed by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, whose son Lincoln Borglum oversaw the final stages after his father's death. Carving took place from 1927 to 1941 using dynamite and hand tools, employing several hundred workers, and no workers died during construction despite the scale and danger of the work. The memorial draws roughly two million visitors a year and remains unfinished relative to Borglum's original plan, which included the presidents' torsos.