American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
Sixteen miles to the east of the city the layer of granite which
underlies the region stuck its back up, so to speak, forming a great
smooth granite hump, known as Stone Mountain. This mountain is one of
America's natural wonders. In form it may be compared with a
round-backed fish, such as a whale or porpoise, lying on its belly,
partly imbedded in a beach, and some conception of its dimensions may be
gathered from the fact that from nose to tail it measures about two
miles, while the center of its back is as high as the Woolworth Building
in New York. Moreover, there is not a fissure in it; monoliths a
thousand feet long have been quarried from it; it is as solid as the
Solid South.
The perpendicular streaks of light and dark gray and gray-green, made by
the elements upon the face of the rock, coupled with the waterfall-like
curve of that face, make one think of a sort of sublimated petrified
Niagara--a fancy enhanced, on windy days, by the roar of the gale-lashed
forest at the mountain's foot.
The idea of turning the mountain into a Confederate memorial originated
with Mr. William H. Terrell of Atlanta. It was taken up with inspired
energy by Mrs. C. Helen Plane, an Atlanta lady, now eighty-seven years
of age, who is honorary president of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy and president of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association.
Mrs. Plane presented the memorial plan to Mr. Samuel H. Venable of
Venable Brothers, owners of the mountain, and Mr. Venable promptly
turned over the whole face of the mountain to the Memorial Association.
The exact form the memorial was to take had not at that time been
developed. Gutzon Borglum was, however, called in, and worked out a
stupendous idea, which he has since been commissioned to execute. On the
side of the mountain, about four hundred feet above the ground, a
roadway is to be gouged out of the granite. On this roadway will be
carved, in gigantic outlines, a Confederate army, headed by Lee and
Jackson on horseback. Other generals will follow, and will, in turn, be
followed by infantry, cavalry and artillery. The leading groups will be
in full relief and the equestrian figures will be fifty or more feet
tall. This means that the faces of the chief figures will measure almost
the height of a man. The figures to the rear of the long column will,
according to present plans, be in bas-relief, and the whole procession
will cover a strip perhaps a mile long, all of it carved out of the
solid mountainside.
A considerable tract of forest land at the foot of the great rock has
already been dedicated as a park. Here, concealed by the trees, at a
point below the main group of figures, a temple, with thirteen columns
representing the thirteen Confederate States, is to be hewn out of the
mountain, to be used as a place for the safe-keeping of Confederate
relics and archives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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