Dave Webb suggested the idea of memorial tablets to be placed in the U.D.C. Hall, at the base of the mountain, to carry the names of relatives who had served in the Confederate Army. Each contributor of $1,000 or more to this fund for carving the memorial was to have the privilege of designating a name for one of the tablets. A family or group contributing a thousand dollars could designate the name of one man for a tablet. Each bronze tablet was to show the name, rank, company and regiment of the soldier or officer so immortalized. This was known as the Founders’ Roll and became very popular and lucrative. In setting forth the purpose of the tablets an announcement was published with the following eloquent preamble by Rogers Winter: As old as human nature is the yearning to memorialize the buried dead, to perpetuate the tradition of illustrious heroes, but never has mankind in all the centuries succeeded in erecting an imperishable monument. Stonehenge is a jumble of granite slabs. The Colossus of Rhodes collapsed two hundred years before Christ and lay in ruins for a thousand years. The Parthenon of Greece, whose marble figures were the most perfect sculpture ever produced, has been virtually dismantled by vandals and art collectors. The pyramids of Egypt are slowly crumbling. Those marvelous temples which adorned the Nile when Egyptian civilization was in its glory are but mounds of debris. The Roman Colosseum is a skeleton of pagan grandeur. But now, in the Providence of God, it becomes our privilege to create here in the heart of the South, in memory of Southern heroes, the one supreme imperishable monument of human history. The sculptor made all the designs for this hall, working on them for weeks and delivering the blueprints of them to the committee in July 1923. It was to be cut in solid rock to a depth of sixty-seven feet; in width it was to be 265 feet. It was divided into three rooms: Georgia Hall in the center, with Venable Hall on the right and U.D.C. Hall on the left. There was to be room for 2,890 memorial tablets. The first work of carving anything at all on Stone Mountain was started on June 18, 1923. The first figure to be carved was, of course, that of Robert E. Lee. The sculptor had made a heroic-size model of the head, seven feet high, in his Stamford studio, and a plaster model of this was brought to the mountain. Much blocking out and roughing off of the surface had to be done before the actual surface of the final figure was reached. The whole area had been gone over carefully and marked out with the aid of the projection lamp.