The United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, and as part of the celebrations, a new feature was added to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The Avenue of Flags — the result of a visitor suggestion — features 56 flags, one for each state, plus one federal district, three territories, and two commonwealths. They are arranged in alphabetical order.

Roughly 18 miles from Mount Rushmore is a sculpture dedicated to Lakota warrior Crazy Horse. In 1939, Korczak Ziolkowski spent a brief time working on the carving of Mount Rushmore. After an argument with Borglum, he left but was approached by Chief Henry Standing Bear about creating a similar monument to Native Americans. Work began in 1948 and is ongoing, relying purely on donations. It is the world’s largest mountain carving in progress.

Visitors to Mount Rushmore may catch a glimpse of shaggy mountain goats hopping among the rocks. In 1924, Canada sent a gift of six mountain goats to nearby Custer State Park. The goats escaped from their enclosure and made their way to the Black Hills, where their descendants remain. There are now more than 200 goats descended from the original six.

Gutzon Borglum’s son, Lincoln, served as his father’s right-hand man throughout the work on Mount Rushmore. He was just 12 when the pair first visited the Black Hills in 1924 to study the potential of the area for a carving. When work first began, Lincoln helped onsite, eventually earning a wage once he reached adulthood. By 1938, he was the site’s superintendent and continued as chief sculptor after his father’s death in 1941.

Susan B. Anthony was a social reformer and a key figure in the women’s suffrage campaign. In 1936, a Minnesota woman named Rose Arnold Powell approached the U.S. government about adding Anthony’s likeness to Mount Rushmore. A bill was introduced in Congress, but Congress voted that work should continue on just the four pre-agreed faces.

In the original plans for the sculpture, Borglum intended to put Thomas Jefferson to the far left as you look at Mount Rushmore. However, the granite on that part of the mountain was less stable. Eventually, workers realized it would be too weak to hold the sculpture, and so they blasted the side away to eliminate the progress made. Jefferson was then moved to be between Washington and Roosevelt.

Working on Mount Rushmore required many long hours in tough conditions. However, the workers found many ways to relax and enjoy their downtime. For one, workers formed a Mount Rushmore baseball team to play against other local teams. In 1939, the Rushmore Drillers reached the semi-finals of the State Amateur Baseball Tournament.

Gutzon Borglum was also the creative mind behind the Confederate Memorial Carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia. The relief sculpture, larger than Mount Rushmore, shows Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. An argument arose between Borglum and the project managers after two years of work, and so he went to work on Mount Rushmore, leaving others to complete Stone Mountain in 1972.

Some visitors to Mount Rushmore insist that, if you look closely, you can see the face of an elephant in the rock to the right of Abraham Lincoln’s face. While not intentional, the natural contours of the rock do take on a certain elephant-head resemblance. Some also claim that, from certain angles, you can see the beginnings of a fifth face carved into the rock.

Mount Rushmore and the surrounding area have long been considered sacred by the local Lakota tribespeople. In Lakota, it was known as Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, which translates to Six Grandfathers. To the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne peoples, the Black Hills were an important spiritual center. It was also an important site for the collection of food and medicinal herbs.

Mount Rushmore is one of the nation’s most famous mountains, but its name came about by chance. In 1885, a New York attorney named Charles Rushmore was sent to South Dakota on business, and he asked some local prospectors the name of a peak he admired. They replied that it had no name, but that they would name it for him. Thus, it became known as Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore — like the surrounding Black Hills — is composed of granite. As some of the oldest rocks in the Western United States, they were formed about 1.6 billion years ago as molten rock rose from the Earth’s core and cooled. Granite is harder than many other rocks, making it ideal for a giant sculpture such as the one at Mount Rushmore.

Of the four presidential faces, George Washington was the first to be completed. A dedication ceremony was held on July 4, 1930, before work on Washington began. It was finished four years later. Thomas Jefferson was completed in 1936, Abraham Lincoln was completed in 1937, and Theodore Roosevelt was finished in 1939. The final dedication of Mount Rushmore took place on October 31, 1941.

As plans progressed for Mount Rushmore, it became clear that a large amount of funding would be needed, and Borglum decided to approach Congress for money. As it happened, President Calvin Coolidge was vacationing in South Dakota at the time Borglum held a ceremony dedicating the proposed monument. Coolidge attended the dedication and promised to allocate government funding.

The idea of carving a giant monument in the Black Hills belongs to South Dakota historian Doane Robinson. In 1923, Robinson wanted to bring visitors to South Dakota and originally envisaged a monument to Western heroes, such as Buffalo Bill and Lewis and Clark, in a nearby rock formation known as the Needles. Borglum explained that the rock there was not suitable but later suggested Mount Rushmore and a presidential monument instead.

Construction on Mount Rushmore began on October 4, 1927. For the next 14 years, hundreds of men and women worked on the project. Dynamite was used to blast large chunks from the granite mountain, and skilled workers calculated how much explosive to use in each area to create the basic outline. After that, a process called honeycombing was used to sculpt the fine details into the finished work.

In drawing up the plans for Mount Rushmore, Borglum decided that there should be a chamber behind the head of Abraham Lincoln called the Hall of Records, showcasing key documents in America’s history. Once Congress found out about the work, they ordered it to stop, arguing that the funds were to be used only for the carving of the faces. The incomplete chamber remains today, but it is inaccessible to visitors.

Gutzon Borglum was born in Idaho in 1867 to a Danish immigrant family. After moving to Utah and Nebraska, Borglum studied in Kansas and later California. He spent several years traveling and studying in Europe before returning to the U.S. in 1901. Having developed a reputation in the art world, Borglum carried out a number of commissions, including carvings of Roosevelt and Lincoln that would later inspire his work in South Dakota.

Mount Rushmore is located in the Black Hills, an isolated mountain range in the western part of South Dakota. The nearest town is Keystone, home to only about 250 people. From Keystone, it is just three miles to Mount Rushmore. The towering monument attracts about 2 million visitors to the region each year.

Mount Rushmore features the giant carved-rock faces of four U.S. Presidents. They are, from left to right, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, is not among them. Mount Rushmore’s sculptor chose these four Presidents because he felt they represented America’s most important historical moments.