The imagination of Gutzon Borglum was just as valuable in his speechmaking as in his sculpture. That the national organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should rally in support of his prodigious memorial is not surprising. The interest and support that the press stirred up in the North and East and West as well as in the South was something of a sensation. In the spring of 1916 the sculptor took his family, Mrs. Borglum and little Lincoln, to Atlanta to live. There Mary Ellis, partly named for Dr. Ellis of the Venable family who saved her life, was born. Sam Venable and his two nieces consented to deed the necessary portions of the cliff face to the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The deeds were formally presented on May 20, 1916. At that time a stone marker was unveiled and a ceremony of dedicating the mountain for a memorial to the Confederacy was performed with Mrs. Plane and a number of Atlanta citizens assisting. In December of that year the businessmen of the community were invited to a meeting at Decatur, county seat of the county in which Stone Mountain is located. Some routine business was being transacted when the sculptor came in and sat in a chair with the audience. He quickly heard the conversation of two men directly in front of him. “What’s this meeting being held for?” whispered one of them. The other sniffed. “Oh,” he said, “some damn fool artist from New York has a notion he can carve up Stone Mountain, and they want him to tell us about it.” When Gutzon rose to speak he addressed all his argument to this second man who turned out to be Forrest Adair, one of the prominent citizens of Atlanta. At the end of the speech Mr. Adair came forward and apologized. “I’ll admit I was skeptical,” he said, “but now I really think it can be done and that you’re the one who can do it.” He was a firm supporter of the memorial plan ever after. Gutzon’s success with the businessmen that day was general. But although he could make mountain carving seem easy to a skeptical opponent, he had more trouble convincing himself. The difficulties began to haunt him day and night. A mural painter facing a vast canvas has a uniform surface on which to lay out his design and balance its parts. Stone Mountain, however, had an irregular, uneven surface, with a huge overhanging bulge which must be harmoniously utilized unless the sculptor wished to convert the side of the mountain into a flat wall before starting his design. How was he ever going to locate his sketch on the mountain? How could he be at once near enough to outline his figures and at the same time be far enough away to get a proper perspective of the whole and establish right proportions? How was he to get his workers to their working stations without utter exhaustion? How were they to work at ease, unhampered by constant dread of a sudden fall? How were they ever going to be able to remove enormous amounts of stone without growing old and gray in the process?