1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
Federal News Network presents a daily update of important moments in the history of the U.S. government.
Sculpting began on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest, South Dakota, on this day in 1927. It took 12 years for the granite images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to be completed. The monument was the brainchild of Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired the sculptor Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain, starting with Washington’s. At the time, Borglum, who had white supremacist sympathies, was already in the midst of building a Confederate monument on the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. But that project had stalled while its funders — the Ku Klux Klan — succumbed to infighting. Workers had to blast Mount Rushmore’s features off the mountain using dynamite. The project cost $1 million and was funded primarily by the federal government. Borglum continued to touch up his work at Mount Rushmore until he died in 1941; he hoped to also carve a series of inscriptions into the mountain, outlining the history of the United States.
(History.com and Smithsonian.com)
Copyright © 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
