Borglum had an impossible dream for Stone Mountain. Its inception was beyond belief. Its execution was unimaginable. Every phase of it presented problems which his smart friends considered insurmountable. He ignored human limitations and took up the job. He created a national state of mind that accepted and approved his impossible project. Then he financed the memorial. He calmly accomplished what it was said could not be done in engineering. He had to have and therefore produced entirely new and hitherto unknown devices in photography, and in mechanics and in his own art. He proceeded to carry out his idea on a scale so colossal as to make it the most miraculous thing ever shaped by human hands.... I have been at Stone Mountain several times with Mr. Borglum. It is rightly described as “the largest upthrust of unbroken granite in the world.” It stands alone. We have all wondered about Mr. Borglum in that work. He was so high that he was merely a small black spot moving across the mountain in the wind. He was giving shape to statues some two hundred feet tall and giving them the grace and detail that you would find in figures in his studio. They said it could not be done.... So Gutzon Borglum did it. And then Lynn Haines told the story of Stone Mountain. Or rather he told an important part of it. He neglected to call attention to the fact that what one man can _do_ another man can _undo_. * * * * * In 1910 the Civil War was still one of the South’s active and bitter memories. There were still plenty of people alive who could tell from personal experience of the pillaging of homes, the burning of Atlanta, the devastation of the Southern countryside by Federal troops. The women of the South had banded together as The United Daughters of the Confederacy to alleviate as well as they could the misery caused by the war and to cherish the memory of their heroes. Gutzon had been commissioned by a branch of the U.D.C. to carve a memorial to the first Southern soldier killed in battle; so he came to meet many of the remarkable membership, including the national president, Mrs. C. Helen Plane of Atlanta. Mrs. Plane was a singularly able woman. Although nearly eighty years old when Gutzon first saw her, she was still vigorous and highly opinionated. She was a person for whom the War between the States had never ended. She was living in Mississippi in the first part of 1861 when her husband, a surgeon, had been killed. With her old colored nurse for company she had toured the battlefield in a one-horse wagon looking for his body. She had found it and taken it home for burial.