If you saw the 2007 moving picture thriller " National Treasure : Book of Secrets , " you in all probability remember the part about South Dakota’sMount Rushmorecontaining a mystical passage that leads to a long - swallow metropolis of gold , which President Calvin Coolidge tried to conceal by having sculptorGutzon Borglumcarve60 - foot ( 18.3 - meter ) facesof four U.S.presidents , into its granite .
Okay , before you get too emotional , that was just a movie . There ’s no Au under Mount Rushmore . But there is a 70 - foot ( 21.4 - meter ) passageway carved inside the mountain , and while it ’s not quite top enigma , the space — which is n’t open to the world — does have a strange story .
The burrow was created in the late 1930s by Borglum , as part of what he envisioned as one of the most crucial features of the monument — an 8,000 - hearty - metrical foot ( 743 - square - meter ) man - made cave that would contain bronze and glass cabinets filled with replica of theU.S. Constitutionand other pregnant document and artifact from U.S. history stamped on Al sheet , along with busts of famous Americans and exhibit exalt U.S. scientific , industrial and aesthetic achievement .
Hall of Records
The Hall of Records , as he call it , would have a 20 - foot ( 6.1 - measure ) entrance with glass doors and a bronze eagle stretching 15 human foot ( 4.6 meter ) from talon to crest above it , along with the motto , " America Marches On . " To supply admission to the hall , Borglum planned to carve an 800 - metrical foot ( 244 - cadence ) granite stairway up the backside of Mount Rushmore , according to this 1975National Park Service historical discipline .
The chamber was part of Borglum ’s grandiose vision to produce a monument that would live for millenary to remind future generation of the United States ' greatness . " Borglum was enamor with the pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes , and other monuments of the ancient world,“explains John Taliaferro , generator of the 2002 book , " Great White Fathers : The Story of the Obsessive Quest to make Mount Rushmore . "
" He require it so that yard of yr into the future , people would not just see these heads , but have the manual and all the art object to reassemble the American civilization — the idea , the countersign , the design , " Taliaferro says .
As Borglum explain in a 1939 letter quote in the NPS study , his goal was " that one great disk should somewhere be made that would — even ten thousand age hence — tell the hoi polloi of what personal manner of men invented and built the great West World Republic . "
Borglum ’s vision of next people someday happening upon his depositary of America ’s long - vanished greatness spookily brings to listen the climactic scene of the 1968 film " Planet of the Apes , " in which the astronaut played by Charlton Heston ventures into the forbidden zone and discovers the Statue of Liberty , embed in the sand .
" It was sort of part fallout protection , part time space capsule , " Taliaferro says .
But Borglum also want the Hall of Records to be imposingly ornate , with flute columns and a cathedral ceiling . He was inspired by Hollywood sets of the variety created forCecil B. DeMille ’s cinematic epic , consort to Taliaferro . Over time , according to the NPS historic subject area , the program grew even more elaborated , with five or six more rooms on a lower trading floor beneath the chief Charles Martin Hall .
Borglum’s Death and WWII
The carver never really calculated how much the Hall of Records would be , which contributed to the project ’s untying . Congress , which had stepped in to fund the memorial , balked at give him a blank check , and work on the hall was halted in 1939 after legislators manoeuvre that the faces of the presidents were the only office of the memorial that should be completed . After Borglum ’s decease and the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 , form on Mount Rushmore was suspend in all . The tunnel was the only part of the Hall to be fill out .
But the sculptor ’s daughter , Mary Ellis Borglum , had a warmth about at least partly complete her father ’s vison for the Hall of Records . At her urging , theMount Rushmore Society , a non-profit-making constitution that patronize improvement at the internal memorial , raised $ 250,000 to make a vault inside the passage , and meet it with 16 porcelain tooth enamel panels . harmonize toNPS , some of the panels recite the tarradiddle of Mount Rushmore , the reason why the four President were choose to be depict on the heap , and provide a short history of the United States as well . A 1,200 - pound ( 544 - kg ) capstone protect the panels .
" This secretary is not approachable to visitors but is left as a phonograph record for masses one thousand of long time from now who may wonder how and why Mount Rushmore was carve , " NPS explains . Gutzon Borglum at long last got what he had wished for .
