Great people leave their mark in history and history, in turn, etches their names for the people to come. A perfect example of great names thriving in history is Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

Mount Rushmore is a masterpiece of Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln Borglum who sculpted the entire granite face of Mount Rushmore to carve out the faces of former heads of the United States. The site of the memorial stretches over 1,278.45 acres and displays the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln – thus, it covers first 150 years of the American history. Borglum selected these presidents because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.

The idea of Mount Rushmore National Memorial was presented by Doane Robinson. The idea was to encourage tourism in the region of South Dakota. The proposed location of the monument was the Needles but Gutzon Borglum rejected the site and chose Mount Rushmore as a better choice for the sculpting project and said: “America will march along that skyline.”

Mount Rushmore was named after a prominent New York lawyer, Charles E. Rushmore, in 1885 but now it is known for a national memorial. The site is under the governance of the National Park Service since 1933. Mount Rushmore was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.It is also listed in the Protected Landscape/Seascape list of IUCN.

Besides the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, the mounument of Mount Rushmore also exhibits text of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, biographies of the four presidents and Borglum, and the history of the U.S. on sixteen porcelain enamel panels.