Mount Rushmore South Dakota, United States

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota, in the United States. Sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, Mount Rushmore features 18 m sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. The entire memorial covers 5.17 km2 and is 1745 m above sea level.

South Dakota historian Doane Robinson is credited with conceiving the idea of carving the likenesses of famous people into the Black Hills region of South Dakota in order to promote tourism in the region. After securing federal funding, construction on the memorial began in 1927, and was completed between 1934 and 1939. Upon Gutzon. Although the initial concept called for each president to be depicted from head to waist, lack of funding forced construction to end in late October 1941. The U.S. National Park Service took control of the memorial in 1933, while it was still under construction, and has managed the memorial to the present day. It attracts nearly three million people annually. Borglum selected Mount Rushmore as the site for several reasons. The rock of the mountain is composed of smooth, fine-grained granite. The durable granite erodes only 25 mm every 10,000 years, thus was more than sturdy enough to support the sculpture and its long term exposure. The height of the mountain 1,745 m above sea level made it suitable, and because it faces the southeast, the workers also had the advantage of sunlight for most of the day.

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