Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
You probably have heard the story of Stone Mountain, Georgia, as who,
alive, hasn’t. Stone Mountain is an isolated mass of granite that rises
abruptly from a plain near Atlanta, and on its precipitous face Gutzon
Borglum once started to carve the pageant of the Confederate Army. The
idea had its inception somewhere around 1910 or 1911. Borglum was asked
to look at the project in 1915; began his preliminary work on it shortly
before the First World War; carving was started in June 1923; the head
of Robert E. Lee, a gigantic sculpture, was unveiled in January 1924;
the figures of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis were roughed out
during the summer of 1924; on February 18, 1925, there were words
between the sculptor and a representative of the Stone Mountain
Confederate Memorial Association; by midsummer the models were broken,
Borglum had left Georgia, and what was probably the world’s first
attempt at mountain carving was abandoned.
The years have produced a variety of stories about what happened at
Stone Mountain, most of them untrue, and there is little use now in
summing them up. But the wreckage on the mountain was an evident fact,
as was the finish of one of sculpture’s most astounding efforts. From
what remained of the carving it was easy to envision the Confederacy’s
last glorious march--the ride of the great leaders with horse, foot and
artillery across the vast granite wall toward what had looked like
immortality. But there wasn’t going to be any immortality.
Borglum’s plan for the depiction of the army had kept pace with his
far-reaching mind. He hadn’t overlooked a detail: In the front would be
the leaders. Behind them the men, a horde of gray-uniformed men, riding
their horses or dragging their guns or staggering afoot from the brink
of the great cliff top, entering this last great parade from out of the
sky. He had made no count of the figures. Apparently there was to be no
end to them ... and no matter. There was a tall precipice in front of
him--thousands and thousands of square yards.
All that was gone now, not only the first of the striking carvings, but
the hope for the memorial’s completion. Gutzon Borglum waited for a long
time for the aid he felt must come--for the miraculous intervention that
would bring the stone soldiers back to the mountain. But nothing came of
half a dozen efforts to put the hard-rock men back at work. Gutzon
Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more.
Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a
mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only
man who ever did it.
On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about
this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in
Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who
knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth.
Haines declared:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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