In 1933 Sam Venable with Mrs. Frank Mason, to whom he gave his share of Stone Mountain, presented a deed to Mayor Key for the portion of the cliff required for carving, and an attempt was made to get W.P.A. funds to finance the undertaking. There was a vast amount of correspondence without result. In 1936 the governor made an investigation of possibilities. In 1937 W. R. Ulrich of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce met Borglum in Washington and they had a friendly conference.
In the winter of 1939-1940 there was another revival of interest, and once more Gutzon was called to Atlanta. The hotel men of Atlanta had suddenly become aware that tourists coming to see Mount Rushmore were dumping large amounts of cash into South Dakota. They were wondering why they had never foreseen this golden reward, and they could see that they needed Gutzon’s help. They were willing to put up enough money to pay for the labor week by week if he would donate his time and use his influence to get credit with the machinery and powder companies.
Gutzon was jubilant. Dr. Ashby Jones, popular clergyman, and Preston Arkright, president of the Georgia Power Company, gave him their blessing. Success seemed so near that the sculptor wrote a letter to John Kaufman, who had succeeded Cliff Davis as stand-by on Stone Mountain, to be ready for starting work next Monday, to lay out a program for a full week. And then that too joined the futile history of the mountain. The other half-owners of the mountain wanted a million dollars which they insisted must be paid to them before work could be resumed. So this chance failed. The matter of the carving on Stone Mountain remained unchanged a year later when the sculptor suddenly died.
Despite the course of ill luck, bickering and unexplained hatred that has accompanied it, the dream of Atlanta for a Confederate memorial—or the dream of Atlanta hotel men for a popular tourist attraction—is still showing signs of life. The state of Georgia has appropriated funds for the purchase of Stone Mountain and the establishment of a park at its base. An Atlanta sculptor has been appointed to take charge of any carving that may be done on the tremendous uplift of granite. The wording of the commission is a bit indefinite as, after all popular experience with the memorial, it should be. But, somehow, the emergence of the Confederate armies from the rock seems a bit nearer than it did yesterday.
There is no recognizable trace today of Gutzon Borglum’s magnificent head of Lee, or of anything else identifiable with the vision of Helen Plane. There is a disfiguring scar, the remnant of a head, part of a horse. But no matter. Some starry-eyed sculptor, somewhere, is figuring on a new supply of dynamite and drills, and some epochal work—it will start any day now, you may hear—to recover Borglum’s unfortunate plan. The mark of his hand is dim, perhaps, but it is still to be found there on the rock—the reminder of what was certainly a noble and, as it turns out, continuous experiment.
The Borglum family moved to Texas from North Carolina in 1925 because the Trail Drivers’ Association wanted a monument and because the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association had definitely set its trail toward nothing. Texas would have been a remarkable spot for them in any case, and it was one place in the universe that they knew little about.
The romantic history of the state—its gracious women, tall men, Spanish warriors and grandees, American pioneers and land seekers, its Alamo, its victorious revolution, its statehood, Indians, rangers, ranchmen, cowboys, trail drivers—all appealed to Gutzon like a journey back to boyhood when he received the invitation of the Trail Drivers’ Association to their conference in 1925. These men, now grown old, wanted a memorial. They wanted to perpetuate the heroes of an epoch when cowboys braved heat and cold, drought and flood, hostile Indians and rustlers, as they drove herds of longhorns northward across hundreds of miles of continent to Kansas or Montana.
It was disappointing to some of the newcomers to discover that San Antonio was a highly civilized city with a cultural history antedating the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. As for their equipment, Mrs. Borglum’s sidesaddle stood for years in a saddle-shop window as an eye-opening evidence of an effete custom.
A studio was improvised in a shed previously used to house floats before the annual “Battle of Flowers” parade. There, while making the first model for the Trail Drivers’ monument, Gutzon was initiated into the lore of the trail. Old cowmen came in
