Remember my posts about Mount Rushmore – the one regarding our visit and the other on the fifth Mount Rushmore face? Well, I have a follow up post on those but this time, what I’ll be sharing with you is the view from the side of the Mount Rushmore and some trivia:
A little bit closer this time…
The right side of Washington in the picture was originally the portion where Thomas Jefferson’s head was carved. After 18 months of carving, the figure of Jefferson had to be blasted off the mountain and restarted on Washington’s left side.
More Mount Rushmore Trivia
Did you know these?
- Over 90% of Mount Rushmore was carved using dynamite. Dynamite blasts removed approximately 450,000 tons of rock from the mountain.
- Mount Rushmore is named after a New York City Attorney Charles E. Rushmore who came to the Black Hills in 1884 to check legal titles on properties. On his way back to Pine Camp, he asked Bill Challis the name of this mountain and Bill replied, “Never had a name but from now on we’ll call it Rushmore.”
- Geologists estimate that the granite at Mount Rushmore National Memorial will erode only 1 inch every 10,000 years.
- Approximately 400 different people worked at Mount Rushmore during the carving process from October 1927 to October 1941. Although this work was dangerous, no lives were lost during the sculpting of the mountain.
- There is a cave in the mountain behind the heads on Mount Rushmore called the Hall of Records.
- Gutzon Borglum and his workers started the drilling in July of 1938 and work was halted in July of 1939.
Hope you had fun learning more about Mount Rushmore. Did you?
