Three million people each year come to the Black Hills of South Dakota to gaze at the faces mounted in granite, the men who founded the country, gave it rule of law and a code of justice, brought it out of slavery, and expanded it to world-leading heights. Gutzon Borglum, the painter-sculptor, was already well known among the wealthy and political elite for doing sculptures of the presidents small — such as a bust of Abraham Lincoln which went on display at Theodore Roosevelt’s White House — and large — such as his carving of a bust of Robert E. Lee in Stone Mountain in Georgia — when south Dakota invited him to make a carving on Mt. Rushmore.

On this day, October 4, 1927, Borglum began his carving of the faces into Mt. Rushmore. South Dakota originally proposed a small project, which Borglum turned national with the insistence of adding the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

Borglum did not do all the work himself: his many assistant frequently took over where possible, leaving him free to travel around the country to lobby for more funds for his project. Among his publicity events was a contest run in conjunctions with the Hearst newspapers in 1934. Readers were invited to submit an inscription to be carved in stone on Mount Rushmore, and one of the winners, a young Nebraskan named William Andrew Burkett, earned a four-year college scholarship and moved to California. Burkett’s submission was not carved on the mountain itself, but was added in a bronze plaque next to it.