The Hall of Records: Mount Rushmore's Unfinished Vault
Most visitors who stand before the four faces never learn that the carving was meant to be only part of the plan. Behind the heads, cut into the wall of a small canyon, Gutzon Borglum intended to build a great chamber, a Hall of Records that would hold the founding documents of the United States and explain to the distant future what the mountain meant and why it had been made. The faces were finished, after a fashion. The hall was not.
Borglum worried about a problem that genuinely troubled him. He believed the carving would outlast civilizations, weathering at a rate so slow that it might stand recognizable for tens of thousands of years. He also suspected that future people might look on the faces with no idea who they were or why anyone had cut them into a cliff, much as we puzzle over monuments left by vanished peoples. The Hall of Records was his answer. It would be a vault carved into solid granite, sealed and durable, in which the texts and records of the nation could be preserved and through which the meaning of the carving could be passed on.
The plan and the start
The chosen site was a canyon wall behind the faces, where the rock could be tunneled into to make a chamber of considerable size. Borglum imagined a grand entrance, bronze and glass doors, and within the hall the great documents of American life, perhaps the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, along with an account of the carving and of the men who had been chosen for it. He spoke of busts of famous Americans and of inscriptions setting down the nation’s history, the whole conceived on the same outsized scale as everything else he attempted.
Work on the tunnel began in the late 1930s. Crews bored a passage into the canyon wall, advancing a tunnel a fair distance into the granite, the rough beginning of the chamber Borglum described. But the project ran into the same forces that constrained the whole carving. Money was always short, the federal officials who controlled the appropriations grew impatient, and there was steady pressure to finish the faces themselves rather than spend on an addition. As the 1930s closed, funding was directed firmly toward completing the carving, and the hall was left as little more than an entrance tunnel driven into the rock.
When Borglum died in the spring of 1941 and his son Lincoln Borglum brought the project to its end that autumn, the Hall of Records was abandoned unfinished, a hole in the mountain that few visitors would ever see. The coming of the Second World War closed off any prospect of returning to it, and for decades the tunnel sat empty.
A partial fulfillment
The idea did not die entirely. Long after Borglum’s death, in the late twentieth century, the National Park Service and others returned to the unfinished tunnel and carried out a modest version of his intention. A repository was placed within the floor of the tunnel, a vault holding inscribed panels that record the story of the carving, the reasons for the choice of the four presidents, and texts about the history of the United States, sealed beneath a capstone. It is not the grand hall Borglum envisioned, and it is not open to the public, but it honors the core of what he wanted, a message left for a future that may need it explained.
The Hall of Records is a window into the mind behind the mountain. Borglum did not think of the carving as a tourist attraction, whatever its origins in Doane Robinson’s tourism idea. He thought of it as a record meant to outlast everything around it, and he wanted that record to speak for itself across an unimaginable stretch of time. The faces are what he managed to finish. The vault behind them, mostly unbuilt, is the measure of how far his ambition ran past the money and the years he was given.