The faces of Mount Rushmore started slowly appearing from the mountain 87 years ago, as a crew of 400 workers under the direction of sculptor Gutzon Borglum began constructing the monument on October 4, 1927. The vision for the monument changed drastically both before and during its construction. A local historian thought that a monument in South Dakota's Black Hills would boost tourism to the area, but he envisioned a tribute to Western heroes like Lewis & Clark and Buffalo Bill Cody in the region's granite pillars known as the Needles. When Borglum came on the project, he thought the Needles offered low-quality granite and the Western focus was too limited. He settled on the face of Mount Rushmore as the site for a nationally-focused memorial with the faces of America's most admired presidents.

Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln had long been part of the national pantheon and were easy choices. Borglum rounded out his quartet with Theodore Roosevelt, a more contemporary choice who had only died eight years before construction started. Calvin Coolidge, who was president at the time, insisted that in addition to Washington, two presidents from his Republican Party and one Democrat be represented. The choice of Roosevelt, a progressive Republican who had broken with his party and run for a third term on a third party ticket in 1912, resulted in a remarkably balanced partisan and ideological mix of faces on the mountain.

The faces were completed and dedicated one at a time between 1934 and 1939: First Washington, then Jefferson, then Lincoln, and finally Roosevelt. (Jefferson was originally supposed to go on Washington's right side, but the rock was deemed unsuitable, causing the original attempt at Jefferson's likeness to be dynamited and a new one started on Washington's left.) There is no true completion date for the monument, because it was never completed to Borglum's vision and probably never will be. He originally planned to carve all four presidents to the waist, but funding ran out for the project and construction ended on Halloween in 1941, seven months after Borglum had died from an embolism. Impressively, not a single worker was killed during 14 years of work on the monument.

Today the site has a visitor's center, a trail, a chamber containing biographies of the presidents and text of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and a theater with a film about the history of Mount Rushmore. It attracts over 2 million visitors a year.

(image source:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Mountrushmore.jpg)