After its completion 75 years ago, the colossal presidential sculpture carved into Mount Rushmore quickly became an American icon. However, few know that hidden behind the hairline of Abraham Lincoln is a doorway to an unfinished chamber originally intended to hold some of America’s most treasured documents.
Mount Rushmore as carving began with conceptual drawing of Borglum’s idea for a the never-built entablature inserted. (Credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)
On Halloween in 1941, the 14-year effort to carve the enormous profiles of four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—into the southeastern face of Mount Rushmore was finally completed. However, one little-known, but critical, element of Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s “Shrine of Democracy Sculpture” was left unfinished and remains concealed from view behind Lincoln’s mighty brow.
Carved into the solid granite wall of a small canyon running right behind the presidential lineup is an 18-foot-tall doorway that resembles the entrance to an ancient tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. While Nicolas Cage’s character in the movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” discovered the entrance to a legendary city of gold inside a cave on Mount Rushmore, no such riches can be found in the actual chamber chiseled into the mountain. Anyone crossing the threshold would discover an empty room approximately 75 feet in length with a 35-foot-tall ceiling. Holes jack-hammered into the walls to hold dynamite for blasting lend a honeycomb effect. Red numbers, perhaps painted by Borglum himself, give instructions for the removal of rocks.
Borglum had intended for this incomplete chamber to be, in essence, his artist’s statement explaining the meaning of his sculpture—not for present generations but for future civilizations, and even interplanetary visitors, thousands of years in the future.
“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,” the sculptor wrote. While the four faces carved on Mount Rushmore are instantly recognizable even to school kids today, Borglum thought they might one day become as mysterious as Stonehenge. “Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor,” he lamented. “Civilizations are ghouls.”
Plans for the Hall of Records. (Credit: Mount Rushmore National Memorial)
The sculptor’s early plans for Mount Rushmore included next to Washington’s head a massive 80-by-120-foot inscription in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase that would list nine of the most important events in the history of the United States between 1776 and 1906. However, even with the most astronomical of point sizes, the text would not have been legible at great distances, and ultimately logistics required that portion of the mountain to be used for Lincoln’s head. Borglum abandoned the inscription and instead drew up plans to build a repository deep within the mountain that would hold some of America’s most treasured artifacts and documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.
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