“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.”