The sculptor stayed several weeks at the nearby home of Samuel H. Venable, head of the family that owned the mountain, while he studied the great stone. Then he drew up sketches of Confederate leaders riding around the mountain, which he submitted to a meeting of the UDC. In 1915 women were not even permitted to vote. Their principal commercial experience was as salesladies, telephone girls and seamstresses. When Borglum said the monument would require ten years and cost three million dollars, the ladies were terrified. They wanted no part of such an undertaking. On March 20, 1916, Sam Venable, Mrs. Coribel Venable Kellogg and Mrs. Robert Venable Roper deeded the face of Stone Mountain and ten adjoining acres to the UDC, with the proviso that the property would be turned back to the original owners if a suitable monument was not completed in twelve years. At their Chattanooga convention in 1917 the UDC ladies founded an independent chartered organization known as the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association to manage the project. World War I stopped non-essential activities. In 1923 Borglum announced that his designs were complete and he was ready to start carving. The world’s largest sculpture presented many unprecedented problems. A difficult one was how to get a sketch of the monument on the mountainside. Borglum announced that he would pour chemicals from above to coat the stone with photographic emulsion, flash an image of his model through a giant enlarger, and develop the picture by pouring down more chemicals. By the time photographers explained to him that it could not be done, his plan had been described in magazines and newspapers around the world, and the Stone Mountain Memorial was news everywhere. Borglum devised a method for using the idea, anyway. There was not even a precedent for determining the size of the carving. The nearest thing was the rule that decreed the diameter of court house clocks. By this scale the statues should be 35 feet high for viewing from the studio 1,300 feet away. A crowd collected the evening the projector was set up. Borglum computed the lens setting to give a 35-foot-tall image, inserted the plate bearing a photograph of his model, and switched on the light. There was a gasp from the spectators. Horses and men looked like midgets. Borglum enlarged the image until it assumed an impressive size, then called to two men, swinging down the mountain in bos’n’s chairs, to measure it. One dangled a tape from the top. The other, reading the figure at the bottom, called out, “One hundred and sixty-eight feet!” [Illustration: Gutzon Borglum with his famous projector, and in the studio with his model.] [Illustration: ... and in the studio.] [Illustration: Oxen hauled timbers up the mountain for the stairway.] [Illustration: Visitors arriving the day carving was begun in June, 1923.]