Surprising story of Mount Rushmore

In order to make a monument of this size, it takes a lot of time and hard work. It took over 14 years and four hundred men to help carve the former President’s faces into the memorial.

Mount Rushmore cost over $1 million to construct. No one died while working in very dangerous conditions.

The fun fact about the monument is that George Washington has the biggest nose out of all the Presidents. The nose on George Washington is 21 feet (6.4m) in length while the rest of the former Presidents have noses that are approximately 20 feet (6m) in length.

Before the monument was made, the mountain was already named after a man named Charles Rushmore. He was a lawyer from New York, who visited the Black Hills in the 1880s.

Some Native American groups don’t like the monument because the land used to belong to them. So a Native American chief from the Souix tribe planned his own monument near there that would honor a Native American named Crazy Horse.

Mount Rushmore once had an amateur baseball team. It even took second place at the South Dakota amateur baseball tournament in 1939.

Boy were hired to shout messages back and forth to the operators. They had to sit on all sides of the mountain.

Mount Rushmore is illuminated every night for 2 hours. In 2015, a new LED illumination was installed to minimize harmful effects on the environment.

The faces will lose some clarity after about 500,000 years. However, it is believed that the shape of Mount Rushmore might remain up to 7 million years.