Mount Rushmore

Gutzon Borglum carved these four presidential faces into the granite of South Dakota's Black Hills between 1927 and 1941. Mount Rushmore depicts George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, each face measuring 60 feet from chin to crown. It remains America's largest sculpture.

Borglum chose presidents who represented the nation's birth (Washington), growth (Jefferson), development (Roosevelt), and preservation (Lincoln). Workers used dynamite to remove 450,000 tons of rock, then refined the features with jackhammers and hand tools. 400 workers participated over 14 years; remarkably, no one died during construction.

The memorial stands in the Black Hills of South Dakota, drawing about three million visitors annually. The site is sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who were promised the land in an 1868 treaty later broken. Nearby, an even larger monument to Lakota leader Crazy Horse has been under construction since 1948. Mount Rushmore's granite erodes only one inch every 10,000 years, meaning the faces should remain recognizable for hundreds of millennia.