far-reaching mind. He hadn’t overlooked a detail: In the front would be
the leaders. Behind them the men, a horde of gray-uniformed men, riding
their horses or dragging their guns or staggering afoot from the brink
of the great cliff top, entering this last great parade from out of the
sky. He had made no count of the figures. Apparently there was to be no
end to them ... and no matter. There was a tall precipice in front of
him--thousands and thousands of square yards.
All that was gone now, not only the first of the striking carvings, but
the hope for the memorial’s completion. Gutzon Borglum waited for a long
time for the aid he felt must come--for the miraculous intervention that
would bring the stone soldiers back to the mountain. But nothing came of
half a dozen efforts to put the hard-rock men back at work. Gutzon
Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more.
Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a
mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only
man who ever did it.
On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about
this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in
Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who
knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth.
Haines declared:
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.
Years afterward, when she and the sculptor had become friends, she asked
him if he had noticed that she didn’t shake hands with him when they
first met ... and she explained. “I was afraid,” she said, “that you
might in some way have been responsible for my husband’s death.”
For many years there had been talk in Atlanta about using the flat
granite front of Stone Mountain to present some sort of Confederate
Memorial. The U.D.C. approved the idea and Mrs. Plane gave impetus to
it. Her plan had little more form than anybody else’s, except that she
had seen the head of Lincoln, by Borglum, in the national capital. She
said that she would like to have the same man carve a head of Lee on
Stone Mountain’s great bare wall.
She interviewed the owner of the mountain, Sam Venable, who promised her
a spot twenty feet square near the base of the cliff on which to carve
the memorial to Lee. And armed with this promise, she wrote to Borglum.
Gutzon did not know anything about Stone Mountain, but he was interested
in Lee. So, in the summer of 1915, he came to Atlanta to meet Mrs. Plane
and her committee. The women met him at the railroad station, drove him
to Stone Mountain, and pointed out the spot donated by Venable. He
looked at it in puzzled silence.
“Well,” snapped Helen Plane, “what do you think of it?”
“Ladies,” gasped the sculptor, “I don’t know what to think. But it seems
to me that a twenty-foot head of Lee on the side of that mountain would
look like a stamp on a barn door.”
The stunned women wanted to take him back to Atlanta where they had
arranged a luncheon and a reception, but he begged off. He wanted to
study the mountain, he said, to see if something could be done with it.
So the U.D.C. committee left him in the rambling old summer home of the
Venables at the lower end of the mountain and trooped off without him.
On that day a friendship and mutual understanding sprang up between
Samuel Venable and Gutzon Borglum that was to last as long as they
lived. The Venable family at the time included Mother Venable, who had
been Cornelia Hoyt and had lived in Atlanta during the Civil War; her
son Sam, already in his fifties, a whimsical bachelor and head of the
family; his two sisters, Leila and Elizabeth; their husbands, Dr. James
N. Ellis and Frank Mason; and the two Mason children, Sam and Leila.
They all lived together in a huge house built of Stone Mountain granite
in Atlanta, spending their summers at the home near the cliff which they
called “Mount Rest.” Sam Venable had been in the granite business with
his brother Will who had died leaving two daughters, both married and
living in their own homes--Mrs. Robert Thornton Roper and Mrs. Coribel
Kellogg Orme.
With the Venables at “Mount Rest” Gutzon passed three pleasant days. He
got up in the early morning to see whether or not the sun’s first rays
touched the cliff. He watched the light traveling all day and studied
the angles and shadows of its fall. On the night of the third day he
watched the mountain with a wisp of pale moon hovering over it. He
seemed to see a gray-uniformed host stealing quietly over the upper edge
of the great wall, moving northward across its face.
That evening he pointed out to Sam Venable what he had seen. Near the
top and sweeping downward, the Confederate armies. Above, the artillery,
appearing at the summit as if coming from beyond. Dropping down and over
to the left across the cliff, a procession of men, guns, horses. Left of
these, the cavalry in full forward motion. And in the center, where the
wall bulged outward, was a colossal group of the principal chieftains of
the Confederacy--Lee, Stonewall Jackson and President Jefferson Davis.
Swinging away to the left were column upon column of Confederate
infantry.
Sam listened and smoked vigorously. Then, after a long study he made his
comment. “I suppose,” he said, “it will take an awful lot of rock.”
Gutzon didn’t smile. “A strip at least two hundred feet wide,” he said.
“The whole of the steep side, clear to the top for the central group
alone.”
“That all?” asked Venable sarcastically.
“No, I’ll need the sky, too. Can’t have any buildings or chimneys
sticking up from behind.”
Sam laughed. “All right,” he said, “you can have it.”
The next day Gutzon went back to Atlanta and told Mrs. Plane and her
committee of his additions to their dream. “We haven’t got enough
money!” declared the practical Mrs. Plane. But Borglum talked to them.
Enough people North and South would be willing to help, he said. He
would go through the country and solicit funds. People would come from
all over the world to pay tribute to these heroes, he said, to pay
tribute to the ones who had died for the right as they had been given to
see the right. It would be a shrine for Americans who had fought,
without hope, without money, without arms, for the things they believed
in. It would be the greatest memorial ever conceived. That’s what Gutzon
Borglum believed, and what he said, and the women agreed with him.
There was to be a national convention of the U.D.C. in San Francisco in
October 1915 and Mrs. Plane and Mrs. Walter Lamar, president of the
Georgia Division, called on Gutzon to attend and tell the delegates
about what he intended to do and why. Gutzon went, marched the warriors
down the mountainside as he had for Sam Venable, and produced the same
results. It was the speech of his life.
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?
His friends begged him not to become involved in so hazardous and
fantastic an undertaking. His younger brother Solon, whom he had
summoned to the spot in 1915 when the monument was first contemplated,
gave the only encouraging suggestion. He said: “You have an advantage
here over most sculptors. All you have to do is remove what stone you
don’t want.”
Helen Plane and her group had collected about two thousand dollars for
their monument to Lee. For the time being Gutzon decided to use that sum
for a scaffold and for steps leading down over the side of the cliff to
permit an examination of the rock and to make preliminary drawings.
A man by the name of Jesse Tucker happened to be working on the
Venable home, and the sculptor became acquainted with him.
Gutzon discovered that he had unusual intelligence, ingenuity and
resourcefulness--qualities indispensable in this entirely new and
different kind of work. He engaged him to construct a flight of steps
going down over the face of the mountain from the top.
This was a hazardous undertaking. At its northern end Stone Mountain
slopes gradually to the ground level. Horse-drawn vehicles as well as
automobiles can reach a point three fifths of the way up with
difficulty. The steep side, the side chosen for the carving, is
precipitous. The slope starts treacherously easy for some feet from the
top and then swiftly changes to a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the
plains of Georgia. A red line shows where the danger begins. Many
stories are told of those who have disregarded the line and plunged to
their deaths. At one or two points there is a narrow ledge, which
occasionally catches a goat or a child who is more lucky.
Mr. Tucker depended largely on Negro labor and was singularly successful
in working with it. He is a man who naturally inspires confidence and,
by going ahead and showing the men just where and how to step, he soon
had them crossing the red line and drilling holes in the rock. Into
these holes steel bars were cemented. The woodwork of the stairway was
attached to the bars. The first stairway was 480 feet long and ended on
a platform ten feet wide with a barrier twenty feet high on the outside.
Conspicuous among Tucker’s Negroes was one called Homer, by whom the
Borglums were adopted. He could take a piece of timber four by eight
inches and eighteen feet long, lift it from the wagon, put it on his
shoulders, carry it to the top of the cliff and down the stairs without
dropping it or pausing for breath.
Jesse Tucker proved to be a helpful organizer and superintendent and a
faithful friend. He played an important part in all that followed. Over
thirty years after this first meeting, the Borglum family was driving
through the Florida town in which he lives. Answering a phone call, he
came over with his whole family. He refreshed Mrs. Borglum’s memory with
many details of work that she had forgotten. He made one memorable
remark: “Men didn’t work _for_ Mr. Borglum. They worked _with_ him.”
That, possibly, is an explanation of how he was able to carve mountains.
The immediate problem which faced the sculptor was how to get men to
their work in the middle of a steep cliff 800 feet high. The quarry men
who had been taking granite from Stone Mountain for years had never
thought of taking any from the steep side. How then were men who had to
be able to handle drills freely and easily without fear on intricate
work to get to their places. Engineers were consulted. All advised
against tackling such an insurmountable problem.
Finally, at the suggestion of the inventor Lester Barlow, The Brown
Hoist Machinery Company of Cleveland, Barlow’s firm, sent two of its
best engineers to Stone Mountain. They went into the matter in great
detail. They evolved a grandiose plan for a steel mechanism 550 feet
high, with sliding platforms and elevators to carry the workers to their
stations. The cost of this structure was set at $200,000, not too much,
probably, but far beyond the reach of the sponsors of the project.
The sculptor, however, was undaunted. He devised a strong leather
harness with a seat attached, to be buckled around the waist, in which a
man could sit and push himself around by his feet, leaving his hands
free to use drills or paintbrush. The harness was attached to a steel
cable fastened at the other end to a winch or wheel hoist, which could
be operated by one man turning the wheel so the worker could be pulled
up or let down as was necessary. The winches were firmly anchored to the
stone.
By this device the sculptor could and did go all over the face of the
cliff, exploring the surface imperfections. Tucker got a bad jolt doing
it in the dark. Even Governor Trinkle of Virginia proved--to the terror
of his wife watching from below--that he too could go adventuring over
the rock. By adding more platforms on which carvers could stand securely
and on which stepladders could be placed to increase their reach, it was
found that men could soon learn to carve as comfortably as in a studio
on the ground.
The sculptor had gone back to Stamford to work on sketches and models
for the carving when the First World War intervened. The government
needed all the engineers in the country. Jesse Tucker joined the army
and went overseas. Gutzon took up the aircraft investigation. The
project of Stone Mountain came to a stop. Work on it was to be delayed
for some eight years.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
_THE IMPERISHABLE MONUMENT_
The sculptor came out of the war and the aircraft investigations heavily
in debt. Fortunately he received some large commissions for carving
public memorials, but the sponsors of these projects wanted to have his
exclusive attention. There was the customary trouble of the setting for
one finished piece, and the creation of another, the Wars of America
group, was a matter that seemed impossible to finish. As a result Stone
Mountain, which seems to have become his most important interest, was a
long time hearing from him.
Jesse Tucker, back from the wars, paid a visit to the old workings and
made an earnest report. “The stairs and scaffolding need immediate
repairs if they are to stay where we put them,” Captain Tucker said. “In
fact, I should earnestly ask you to come down here if you don’t want to
lose everything you accomplished before the war.”
There wasn’t much more money available. People digging down in their
pockets to support a world war didn’t have much change for a memorial to
the Confederacy. That had waited until now; it could wait further. But
lack of cash did not delay Gutzon after he had heard from Tucker. There
never had been any cash anyway.
When Borglum arrived at Stone Mountain in the summer of 1921 he was
filled with new enthusiasms, new ideas that had come to him during the
war years and during his struggles with headstrong committeemen who
couldn’t decide what they wanted. The sculptor looked at the granite
mountain and took a deep breath. After all, this was home. This was one
place in America where he could never have harsh words with anybody.
Here were people who thought as he did--people willing to sacrifice
anything they had, to glorify the spirit of those who had gone.
Something more than a tremendous picture of the Confederate Army was to
be left here, Gutzon decided. He needed a studio in this area; so he
would build one at the foot of the mountain--a huge one made of
permanent materials. And when the project was finished this building
could be converted into a vast art school of a sort much needed in the
South. The students, he declared, would be able to learn about sculpture
by looking at it, by being a part of a great work as they did in
medieval Italy.
He designed a great hall to be cut into the rock below the marching
statues. This was to be a memorial to the women of the South and a
depository for their records. In addition to that he was planning an
open-air amphitheater at the base of the mountain. He gave this some
tests. Marie Tiffany of the Metropolitan Opera Company came down to sing
for a select few and demonstrated the perfect acoustics of the place.
This will be a shrine to gladden the soul, said Gutzon. And it looked as
if it might be.
For a year the sculptor was forced to commute between Stamford and
Atlanta. But with Tucker looking after the work on the cliff it began to
progress. Sam Venable and Forrest Adair took up the assignment of
raising more money.
Borglum decided to scaffold the entire area necessary for blocking and
carving the central group, nearly an acre of perpendicular granite wall.
This arrangement would have a higher initial cost but would make it
easier and quicker to work the rock. An entirely new approach to the
project was built from below, 700 feet of steps up to a solid platform.
The platform was hung on the mountainside 550 feet above the base, and
on it were the blacksmith shops, drill-sharpening apparatus, hoists,
power plants, supply rooms and machine shops. Air compressors were
installed with air lines and feeders 1,700 feet from the base. A cable
hoist was erected and the mountain electrified.
The cost of bringing electricity to the mountain was estimated by the
Georgia Power Company at $15,000, but it never came to that. Preston
Arkright, president of the company, was interested in Gutzon’s plan to
carve a mountain. He reduced the bill eighty per cent and presently
canceled it altogether.
Once the way was provided for the men to get to their working stations,
Gutzon faced the problem of getting something arranged for them to work
on. He had next to place his design on the great wall of rock in exactly
the right place and proper proportion to the scale of the mountain. The
size of the figures was so great and the surface of the wall such that
the ordinary scale model which sculptors use was not satisfactory. It
was absolutely impossible to get any sense of correct proportion from a
steel cage let down over the face of the mountain on cables.
Large drawings were hung over the cliff without success. Then Gutzon
began experimenting with a lamp projector which could throw photographs
of his models on the mountain face. Up to that time the largest
projection machine had a range of only 300 feet. The manufacturers of
such machines, whom Gutzon consulted, declared that a lamp powerful
enough to project a picture 800 feet would produce such intense heat
that the lens would be broken and the slide melted.
Finally Gutzon went to E. S. Porter of the Precision Machine Company of
New York who promised to build a projector according to his
requirements. After months of experiment the lamp was ready for trying
out on the photographic slides of Lee and his generals taken from
Gutzon’s sketches. The test was made in Stamford; the lamp placed on a
terrace near the house and the biggest sheets he could find stretched
across the meadow several hundred feet away. The Connecticut Power
Company ran the electricity through a special wire.
While the sculptor was fussing with the slide to get the proper focus,
his little girl began jumping up and down and pointing her little
finger. She exclaimed: “Oh, Daddy, look! Horses riding through the
field.” And sure enough! There were horses carrying Generals Lee and
Jackson riding like ghosts upon the slightly misty atmosphere, far ahead
of the sheets hung there to catch them.
The lamp was taken down to Stone Mountain where another difficulty was
encountered. The carving was at an elevation of 350 feet. That meant
that the light beam carrying the design traveled upward at an angle of a
little more than fifty degrees, which meant great distortion. The
sculptor discovered that by tipping the slide at a corresponding angle,
this distortion could be overcome.