Stone Mountain’s story is often repeated and seldom--very seldom--authentic. What you see of the place today is mostly what was here on one dire day in February 1925 when Borglum’s work on it came to an end--forever. But there is much about it that anyone who cares may know. Mrs. Helen Plane, an aging Daughter of the Confederacy, had dreamed one night that the history of the South’s Great Cause might be carved in vast figures on the surface of this cliff, General Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis and a list of towering generals marching forever across the granite at the head of the defiant troops. She brought the matter to the attention of Borglum, and he was probably the one artist in the world who would understand what she wanted done and would find a way to get it done. That was in 1915. Borglum made a trip from Washington to Atlanta and inspected the mountain. In 1924 this fantastic undertaking was no longer anybody’s dream; it was well under way. The first group of figures, Lee and Davis and Jackson and the generals, had been outlined on the mountain, following the flag to perpetual glory. Lee himself was appearing in a stature that Art had never before given to anyone anywhere. Machinery was in place for diagram projection, power, hoisting, drilling, carving, hauling, dynamiting. The business of high-explosive carving had been brought to a point of almost unbelievable fineness and accuracy. After years of money shortage the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association was looking into a debt-free future with a million or two dollars of surplus cash in the treasury. The last march of the Confederacy was definitely on its way.... * * * * * Up in Pierre, South Dakota, State Historian Doane Robinson, a scholar with patriotism, an extraordinary love for beauty and very little knowledge of magnificent finance, looked at the news photographs of the Stone Mountain project and studied the rotogravure outlines of what the sculptured cliff would look like when Gutzon Borglum finished with it. And he wondered that nobody had ever thought of trying a similar scheme in the mountains of South Dakota, the Black Hills. He wrote a letter to Borglum inquiring why. The sculptor wrote that he was perfectly willing to look into the sculptural possibilities of the Black Hills if anybody in South Dakota was willing to provide the necessary expenses. A few months later Robinson wrote, somewhat erroneously, that the state of South Dakota would underwrite this not too considerable sum; so Borglum came out, looked at the Hills and toured their hinterland late in the summer of 1925. * * * * *