CARVING
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson ride forever on Stone Mountain.
Stone Mountain’s Confederate Memorial is the world’s largest piece of sculpture, cut into the side of the world’s biggest exposed mass of granite. The carving is 90 feet tall and 190 feet wide, stands eleven and a half feet out from the side of the mountain, and towers 400 feet above the ground in a frame that is 360 feet square, or three acres. Fifty-five years elapsed from the time of the original concept in 1915 until completion of the three figures in 1970. Not a blow of the hammer was struck for 36 years, from 1928 to 1964.
At Stone Mountain things have a way of coming out quite differently than planned.
History is a little hazy on who first envisioned a Confederate Memorial on Stone Mountain. Mrs. Helen Plane, charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was quoted in 1909 as thinking it would be a fine place for a monument. In 1912 John Temple Graves, editor of the New York American, after a visit back home wrote a rousing editorial for the Atlanta Georgian urging that the world’s greatest monument be carved on the world’s finest piece of stone.
Actual movement began in 1915 when Mrs. Plane, then president of the Atlanta chapter of UDC, suggested having a 70-foot statue of General Robert E. Lee carved on the steep side of the mountain. The UDC consulted Gutzon Borglum, who just then was being acclaimed for his statue of Abraham Lincoln. The first look at Stone Mountain set Borglum’s imagination afire. Here was the biggest, finest solid block of granite any sculptor ever had an opportunity to carve. A small figure in its center, he pointed out, would be like a postage stamp stuck on a barn.
The sculptor stayed several weeks at the nearby home of Samuel H. Venable, head of the family that owned the mountain, while he studied the great stone. Then he drew up sketches of Confederate leaders riding around the mountain, which he submitted to a meeting of the UDC.
In 1915 women were not even permitted to vote. Their principal commercial experience was as salesladies, telephone girls and seamstresses. When Borglum said the monument would require ten years and cost three million dollars, the ladies were terrified. They wanted no part of such an undertaking.
On March 20, 1916, Sam Venable, Mrs. Coribel Venable Kellogg and Mrs. Robert Venable Roper deeded the face of Stone Mountain and ten adjoining acres to the UDC, with the proviso that the property would be turned back to the original owners if a suitable monument was not completed in twelve years. At their Chattanooga convention in 1917 the UDC ladies founded an independent chartered organization known as the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association to manage the project.