That’s right – Gutzon Borglum, the famous sculptor who chiseled Mount Rushmore, was born on this day back in 1867.  I’ve been to Mount Rushmore National Memorial several times, but realized today that I didn’t really know all that much about the man who created it. A little research with the National Park Service quickly changed that.

Born John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, his parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark just a few years before his birth. Borglum’s family moved around frequently during his childhood and he developed an early interest in art, but never actually studied it until he attended a private school in Kansas.

After graduating from the equivalent of high school, Borglum moved to California where his career as an artist began to pick up speed. He opened his own studio and earned enough of a living to eventually move to France for more in-depth art education. It was during his time in France that his real love of sculpting took shape.

Borglum, now in his mid-thirties, returned to the U.S. in 1901 and spent the next several years sculpting professionally and pursuing political interests with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. During these years, Borglum split his time between his two sculpting studios – one in New York and the other in Stamford, Connecticut, where he lived with his now second wife and two children.

It was in that New York studio that Borglum first sculpted a large marble bust of Abraham Lincoln. The bust was later purchased and donated to the people of the United States – it still stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C.

In 1915, Borglum visited Stone Mountain in Georgia and agreed to sculpt Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, along with several soldiers on horseback, into the side of the mountain. During his carving of Stone Mountain, Borglum learned the art of sculpting rock with dynamite from a Belgian engineer. It was this skill that would later serve so useful in his work in the Black Hills.

Only a year into the Stone Mountain project, Borglum ran afoul with the businessmen who were directing the project and he was quickly removed from the massive project.

While things were unraveling for Borglum with the Stone Mountain project, had also been in contact with Doane Robinson, the State Historian of South Dakota. Robinson asked Borglum to consider coming to South Dakota to tackle a mountain carving. He visited the Black Hills, agreed to do the project and then returned permanently in 1925 to begin work on the four famous faces in the Black Hills.

The remainder of Borglum’s life was devoted to the work of creating Mount Rushmore National Memorial. He died in 1941 and the mountain carving was eventually completed by his son, Lincoln Borglum.

Today, 143 years after Gutzon Borglum’s birth, his most famous work of art still stands proud and is the most popular attraction in the Black Hills, drawing almost three million visitors every year.