Mount Rushmore was declared complete

On October 31, 1941, work on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills was declared complete. Carving had begun on October 4, 1927, and over fourteen years a crew of roughly 400 workers blasted and chiseled the granite faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, each carved about 60 feet tall.

The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, had envisioned the figures rendered from head to waist, but the ambition outran the money. Federal funding dried up, and the project was halted at the heads we know today.

Borglum did not see it finished. He died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln Borglum oversaw the final months. The memorial sits on land in the Black Hills sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who had been guaranteed the territory by treaty before it was seized — a contested history the carving carries alongside its fame. The monument now draws roughly two million visitors a year.