Washington's Nose

There's no such thing as Presidents' Day.

According to United States federal government code, the holiday is named Washington's Birthday, and has been since it went nationwide in 1885.

But common practice is more inclusive. The holiday expanded to add in other U.S. presidents in the 1960s, and the moniker Presidents' Day became popular in the 1980s and stuck. It may be that George Washington (b. February 22, 1732) andAbraham Lincoln (b. February 12, 1809) still get the lion's share of attention—and appear in all the retail sale ads—on the third Monday in February, but the popular idea is that all 44 presidents get feted.

Mount Rushmore is a lot like that one day a year writ large—and in granite. It's carved 60 feet (18 meters) tall and 185 feet (56 meters) wide, from Washington's right ear to Lincoln's left.

The monument's sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, grew up in Idaho, a first-generation American born to Danish parents. He studied art in France and became good friends with Auguste Rodin. Borglum mostly worked in bronze, but in the early 1910s he was hired to carve the likenesses of Confederate leaders into Stone Mountain in Georgia.

He was about to be fired from that job for creative differences about the same time that a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson had an idea. Robinson wanted to have a monument carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, maybe Western historical figures like Chief Red Cloud and Lewis and Clark, each on their own granite spire. (Plan a road trip in the Black Hills.)

Robinson hired Borglum and gave him carte blanche. Borglum was looking for something with national appeal, so he chose to depict four presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

Borglum wanted to represent the first 150 years of the nation's history, choosing four presidents as symbols of their respective time periods. He took a tour of western South Dakota, searching for an ideal canvas.

The sculptor was looking for three things: a surface strong enough to sculpt, a mountain big enough to hold several figures, and a mountain face that received morning sunlight. Mount Rushmore fit the bill and was already part of a national forest, so it was easy to set aside as a national memorial.

Work started in 1927. Calvin Coolidge attended the dedication ceremony. It took 14 years to finish the carving, conducted mostly in summertime because of the area's harsh winters.

There were approximately 30 workers on the mountain at any give time. In total about 400 had worked on it by the time the monument was finished. Though the project involved thousands of pounds of dynamite and perilous climbs, not a single person died during the work.

Borglum himself died of natural causes in 1941, though, just six months before the project was declared "closed as is" by Congress that Halloween. His son Lincoln—named for his father's favorite president—took over.

In the photo above, a worker refines the details of Washington's left nostril.

About 90 percent of the mountain was carved using dynamite, which could get within 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of the final facial features. For those last few inches, workers used what was known as the honeycomb method: Jackhammer workers pounded a series of three-inch-deep holes followed up by chiselers who knocked off the honeycomb pieces to get the final shape. Then carvers smoothed the "skin's" surface.

Dynamite Faces

The December 1930 issue ofDuPontMagazinetouted the company's role in making the monument: "[Washington's] head, measuring 60 feet from pate to chin and 45 feet from ear to ear, is visible to the naked eye for several miles."

"In forming this head more than 2,000 cubic yards of granite have been removed, a task requiring the use of about 6,000 pounds of 40 per cent du Pont special gelatin dynamite, and 40,000 No. 6 du Pont electric blasting caps."

Granite Vision

To get faces to emerge from the mountain, workers bore cylindrical holes into the granite and ran electric charges from a blasting cap to a plunger box on the top of the mountain. The dynamite blasts were set off once all the workers were off the mountain.

High Wires

Three-eighths-inch steel cables raised, lowered, and suspended workers on the mountain. The only other way to the top was a set of 700 steps.

At the end of the cable was a bosun chair, inspired by the seats used by shipworkers when doing hull repairs. A leather belt added security.

Facial Finishing

To transfer the facial dimensions from Borglum's models to the mountain—how deep eyes should be set, where a nose would be—workers used red paint. An inch (2.5 centimeters) on the model equaled a foot (0.3 meter) on the mountain. There's still a bit of crimson under Lincoln's nostrils today.

Moveable Houses

Most of the buildings on the mountain were winch houses. Each had about five or six winches that would raise or lower workers.

Most of the winch houses also had 5-foot-high (1.5-meter-high) models of the faces inside so workers could envision what they were carving. "Face-to-face with granite all day long, they might not be able to see the big picture," says Mount Rushmore historian Amy Bracewell.

Dangerous Jobs

No special training was required to be on the monument-building team, but fortitude was. It was dangerous work. "They used the men who were willing to do it," says Bracewell.

With the bulk of the carving happening during the Great Depression, unemployed local tin and feldspar miners, along with ranchers and farmers, made up most of the workers' ranks.

—Johnna Rizzo