Hidden Room In Mount Rushmore

This article was about a hidden room; but not just anywhere, in Mount Rushmore! Gutzon Borglum, an Idaho-born son of a Danish immigrant began carving the faces in 1927, but died before they finished. However, he decided to make a hidden room that was going to be named The Hall of Records that would house all the important artefacts anyone would ever need. He was stated saying, “You might as well drop a letter into the world’s postal service without an address or signature, as to send that carved mountain into history without identification,” He was basically saying, that everyone eventually forgets who made every wonderful thing, so he wanted to make sure he was never forgotten.

Borglum posed his idea of the hidden room to the government, but they didn’t like his idea. They told him to just focus on the faces and not do the hidden room, which was already started. The hidden room was started just above Abe Lincoln’s hairline, and Borglum had big plans for that room. However, Borglum never finished the faces or the room. Borglum died just shy of his 74th birthday, and his son stepped in to finish the faces. It took him 7 months to finish adding the final details to the faces, at which the government said to stop working on it; that the project was finished.

Borglum’s family begged for decades to let them finish the room, for their father’s memory. Finally the government, in 1998 put out porcelain tablets laying out the plans, with a quote from Borglum himself: ‘ … let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.’

Why, might you ask, would someone start a 14 year project? Well, he was very stubborn and after one of his previous projects backfired, with the genders of angels, he had the same experience trying to carve Robert E. Lee into the side of the Georgia’s Stone Mountain. So being the very stubborn, hard headed person that he was, he decided to start the faces on Mount Rushmore. After he died, his son took over and in 7 months finished the faces. Then, for decades, the rest of the Borglum family begged the government to finish the room. Instead of finishing the room, the government put in porcelain tablets explaining the history of the room. However, now the room is off limits to the public, so visitors will have to be satisfied with the photographic evidence.