Lincoln Borglum and the Completion of Mount Rushmore
When Gutzon Borglum died in the spring of 1941, the carving on the mountain was close to its visible end but not quite there. The four faces had emerged from the granite, yet finishing work remained, and the great chamber the elder Borglum had imagined behind the heads stood barely begun. The task of bringing the project to a stopping point fell to the man who knew it best after his father, his son Lincoln.
Lincoln Borglum had grown up inside the work. As a boy and then a young man he had spent his summers and seasons on the mountain, learning the rigging, the drilling, the transfer of measurements from the studio model to the cliff. He had served as an assistant and superintendent through the later years of the carving, handling the practical management of the crew while his father attended to design, money, and the endless quarrels that came with both. By the time of his father’s death he was not a stranger stepping in but a foreman who had been running much of the daily operation for some time.
Finishing the work
The work Lincoln directed in 1941 was the careful, undramatic kind that closes out a long project. The bold shaping by dynamite was finished. What remained was finishing of surfaces, refinement of features, and decisions about how much further to push given that money and patience were both running low. The carving had always lived hand to mouth on federal appropriations, and by the early 1940s the national mood was turning toward war and away from monuments. There would be no funds for the grand additions the elder Borglum had wanted.
Among the things left undone was the Hall of Records, the vault his father had planned to cut into the canyon wall behind the faces to hold the nation’s founding documents. Only a rough entrance tunnel had been started. There would be no time or money to finish it, and Lincoln understood that the carving itself had to be the priority. The decision was made to bring the project to an end with the faces essentially complete and the broader scheme abandoned.
Work on the mountain stopped in the autumn of 1941, not long before the United States entered the Second World War. The memorial was declared finished, though finished is a generous word for a design that had been trimmed repeatedly as flaws in the rock and shortages of cash forced changes. What stood was the four faces, weathered into the granite at a scale that still surprises first-time visitors, and that was judged enough.
A quieter legacy
Lincoln Borglum did not have his father’s appetite for public battle, and his role is easy to overlook beside the larger figure of Gutzon. But the completion of Rushmore was a real accomplishment of management and craft, carried out in a difficult year by a man grieving a father and closing out a project that had defined both their lives. He later served for a time in connection with the memorial’s early administration as it passed into the care of the National Park Service, and he wrote about the carving and his father’s work, helping to set down a record while the men who had done the labor were still living.
He spent much of his later life in Texas and elsewhere, returning to the Black Hills and the mountain that had shaped his youth. He died in the 1980s, and the carvers he had supervised, the drillers and powdermen who had hung over the canyon on cables, were scattered into ordinary lives across the region.
The mountain that drew its first impulse from Doane Robinson’s tourism idea and its design from Gutzon Borglum owes its final form, in a quieter way, to the son who saw it through. The faces are the father’s vision. That they were brought to a coherent end, rather than left a half-carved ambition stranded by war and money, is largely the son’s doing.