CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

_STONE MOUNTAIN_

You probably have heard the story of Stone Mountain, Georgia, as who, alive, hasn’t. Stone Mountain is an isolated mass of granite that rises abruptly from a plain near Atlanta, and on its precipitous face Gutzon Borglum once started to carve the pageant of the Confederate Army. The idea had its inception somewhere around 1910 or 1911. Borglum was asked to look at the project in 1915; began his preliminary work on it shortly before the First World War; carving was started in June 1923; the head of Robert E. Lee, a gigantic sculpture, was unveiled in January 1924; the figures of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis were roughed out during the summer of 1924; on February 18, 1925, there were words between the sculptor and a representative of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association; by midsummer the models were broken, Borglum had left Georgia, and what was probably the world’s first attempt at mountain carving was abandoned.

The years have produced a variety of stories about what happened at Stone Mountain, most of them untrue, and there is little use now in summing them up. But the wreckage on the mountain was an evident fact, as was the finish of one of sculpture’s most astounding efforts. From what remained of the carving it was easy to envision the Confederacy’s last glorious march--the ride of the great leaders with horse, foot and artillery across the vast granite wall toward what had looked like immortality. But there wasn’t going to be any immortality.

Borglum’s plan for the depiction of the army had kept pace with his far-reaching mind. He hadn’t overlooked a detail: In the front would be the leaders. Behind them the men, a horde of gray-uniformed men, riding their horses or dragging their guns or staggering afoot from the brink of the great cliff top, entering this last great parade from out of the sky. He had made no count of the figures. Apparently there was to be no end to them ... and no matter. There was a tall precipice in front of him--thousands and thousands of square yards.

All that was gone now, not only the first of the striking carvings, but the hope for the memorial’s completion. Gutzon Borglum waited for a long time for the aid he felt must come--for the miraculous intervention that would bring the stone soldiers back to the mountain. But nothing came of half a dozen efforts to put the hard-rock men back at work. Gutzon Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more. Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only man who ever did it.

On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth. Haines declared:

Borglum had an impossible dream for Stone Mountain. Its inception was beyond belief. Its execution was unimaginable. Every phase of it presented problems which his smart friends considered insurmountable. He ignored human limitations and took up the job. He created a national state of mind that accepted and approved his impossible project. Then he financed the memorial. He calmly accomplished what it was said could not be done in engineering. He had to have and therefore produced entirely new and hitherto unknown devices in photography, and in mechanics and in his own art. He proceeded to carry out his idea on a scale so colossal as to make it the most miraculous thing ever shaped by human hands.... I have been at Stone Mountain several times with Mr. Borglum. It is rightly described as “the largest upthrust of unbroken granite in the world.” It stands alone.

We have all wondered about Mr. Borglum in that work. He was so high that he was merely a small black spot moving across the mountain in the wind. He was giving shape to statues some two hundred feet tall and giving them the grace and detail that you would find in figures in his studio.

They said it could not be done.... So Gutzon Borglum did it.

And then Lynn Haines told the story of Stone Mountain. Or rather he told an important part of it. He neglected to call attention to the fact that what one man can _do_ another man can _undo_.

* * * * *

In 1910 the Civil War was still one of the South’s active and bitter memories. There were still plenty of people alive who could tell from personal experience of the pillaging of homes, the burning of Atlanta, the devastation of the Southern countryside by Federal troops.

The women of the South had banded together as The United Daughters of the Confederacy to alleviate as well as they could the misery caused by the war and to cherish the memory of their heroes. Gutzon had been commissioned by a branch of the U.D.C. to carve a memorial to the first Southern soldier killed in battle; so he came to meet many of the remarkable membership, including the national president, Mrs. C. Helen Plane of Atlanta.

Mrs. Plane was a singularly able woman. Although nearly eighty years old when Gutzon first saw her, she was still vigorous and highly opinionated. She was a person for whom the War between the States had never ended.

She was living in Mississippi in the first part of 1861 when her husband, a surgeon, had been killed. With her old colored nurse for company she had toured the battlefield in a one-horse wagon looking for his body. She had found it and taken it home for burial.

Years afterward, when she and the sculptor had become friends, she asked him if he had noticed that she didn’t shake hands with him when they first met ... and she explained. “I was afraid,” she said, “that you might in some way have been responsible for my husband’s death.”

For many years there had been talk in Atlanta about using the flat granite front of Stone Mountain to present some sort of Confederate Memorial. The U.D.C. approved the idea and Mrs. Plane gave impetus to it. Her plan had little more form than anybody else’s, except that she had seen the head of Lincoln, by Borglum, in the national capital. She said that she would like to have the same man carve a head of Lee on Stone Mountain’s great bare wall.

She interviewed the owner of the mountain, Sam Venable, who promised her a spot twenty feet square near the base of the cliff on which to carve the memorial to Lee. And armed with this promise, she wrote to Borglum.

Gutzon did not know anything about Stone Mountain, but he was interested in Lee. So, in the summer of 1915, he came to Atlanta to meet Mrs. Plane and her committee. The women met him at the railroad station, drove him to Stone Mountain, and pointed out the spot donated by Venable. He looked at it in puzzled silence.

“Well,” snapped Helen Plane, “what do you think of it?”

“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.”

The next day Gutzon went back to Atlanta and told Mrs. Plane and her committee of his additions to their dream. “We haven’t got enough money!” declared the practical Mrs. Plane. But Borglum talked to them. Enough people North and South would be willing to help, he said. He would go through the country and solicit funds. People would come from all over the world to pay tribute to these heroes, he said, to pay tribute to the ones who had died for the right as they had been given to see the right. It would be a shrine for Americans who had fought, without hope, without money, without arms, for the things they believed in. It would be the greatest memorial ever conceived. That’s what Gutzon Borglum believed, and what he said, and the women agreed with him.

There was to be a national convention of the U.D.C. in San Francisco in October 1915 and Mrs. Plane and Mrs. Walter Lamar, president of the Georgia Division, called on Gutzon to attend and tell the delegates about what he intended to do and why. Gutzon went, marched the warriors down the mountainside as he had for Sam Venable, and produced the same results. It was the speech of his life.

The imagination of Gutzon Borglum was just as valuable in his speechmaking as in his sculpture. That the national organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should rally in support of his prodigious memorial is not surprising. The interest and support that the press stirred up in the North and East and West as well as in the South was something of a sensation.

In the spring of 1916 the sculptor took his family, Mrs. Borglum and little Lincoln, to Atlanta to live. There Mary Ellis, partly named for Dr. Ellis of the Venable family who saved her life, was born.

Sam Venable and his two nieces consented to deed the necessary portions of the cliff face to the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The deeds were formally presented on May 20, 1916. At that time a stone marker was unveiled and a ceremony of dedicating the mountain for a memorial to the Confederacy was performed with Mrs. Plane and a number of Atlanta citizens assisting.

In December of that year the businessmen of the community were invited to a meeting at Decatur, county seat of the county in which Stone Mountain is located. Some routine business was being transacted when the sculptor came in and sat in a chair with the audience. He quickly heard the conversation of two men directly in front of him.

“What’s this meeting being held for?” whispered one of them.

The other sniffed. “Oh,” he said, “some damn fool artist from New York has a notion he can carve up Stone Mountain, and they want him to tell us about it.”

When Gutzon rose to speak he addressed all his argument to this second man who turned out to be Forrest Adair, one of the prominent citizens of Atlanta.

At the end of the speech Mr. Adair came forward and apologized. “I’ll admit I was skeptical,” he said, “but now I really think it can be done and that you’re the one who can do it.” He was a firm supporter of the memorial plan ever after.

Gutzon’s success with the businessmen that day was general. But although he could make mountain carving seem easy to a skeptical opponent, he had more trouble convincing himself. The difficulties began to haunt him day and night. A mural painter facing a vast canvas has a uniform surface on which to lay out his design and balance its parts. Stone Mountain, however, had an irregular, uneven surface, with a huge overhanging bulge which must be harmoniously utilized unless the sculptor wished to convert the side of the mountain into a flat wall before starting his design.

How was he ever going to locate his sketch on the mountain? How could he be at once near enough to outline his figures and at the same time be far enough away to get a proper perspective of the whole and establish right proportions?

How was he to get his workers to their working stations without utter exhaustion? How were they to work at ease, unhampered by constant dread of a sudden fall? How were they ever going to be able to remove enormous amounts of stone without growing old and gray in the process?

His friends begged him not to become involved in so hazardous and fantastic an undertaking. His younger brother Solon, whom he had summoned to the spot in 1915 when the monument was first contemplated, gave the only encouraging suggestion. He said: “You have an advantage here over most sculptors. All you have to do is remove what stone you don’t want.”

Helen Plane and her group had collected about two thousand dollars for their monument to Lee. For the time being Gutzon decided to use that sum for a scaffold and for steps leading down over the side of the cliff to permit an examination of the rock and to make preliminary drawings.

A man by the name of Jesse Tucker happened to be working on the Venable home, and the sculptor became acquainted with him. Gutzon discovered that he had unusual intelligence, ingenuity and resourcefulness--qualities indispensable in this entirely new and different kind of work. He engaged him to construct a flight of steps going down over the face of the mountain from the top.

This was a hazardous undertaking. At its northern end Stone Mountain slopes gradually to the ground level. Horse-drawn vehicles as well as automobiles can reach a point three fifths of the way up with difficulty. The steep side, the side chosen for the carving, is precipitous. The slope starts treacherously easy for some feet from the top and then swiftly changes to a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the plains of Georgia. A red line shows where the danger begins. Many stories are told of those who have disregarded the line and plunged to their deaths. At one or two points there is a narrow ledge, which occasionally catches a goat or a child who is more lucky.

Mr. Tucker depended largely on Negro labor and was singularly successful in working with it. He is a man who naturally inspires confidence and, by going ahead and showing the men just where and how to step, he soon had them crossing the red line and drilling holes in the rock. Into these holes steel bars were cemented. The woodwork of the stairway was attached to the bars. The first stairway was 480 feet long and ended on a platform ten feet wide with a barrier twenty feet high on the outside.

Conspicuous among Tucker’s Negroes was one called Homer, by whom the Borglums were adopted. He could take a piece of timber four by eight inches and eighteen feet long, lift it from the wagon, put it on his shoulders, carry it to the top of the cliff and down the stairs without dropping it or pausing for breath.

Jesse Tucker proved to be a helpful organizer and superintendent and a faithful friend. He played an important part in all that followed. Over thirty years after this first meeting, the Borglum family was driving through the Florida town in which he lives. Answering a phone call, he came over with his whole family. He refreshed Mrs. Borglum’s memory with many details of work that she had forgotten. He made one memorable remark: “Men didn’t work _for_ Mr. Borglum. They worked _with_ him.” That, possibly, is an explanation of how he was able to carve mountains.

The immediate problem which faced the sculptor was how to get men to their work in the middle of a steep cliff 800 feet high. The quarry men who had been taking granite from Stone Mountain for years had never thought of taking any from the steep side. How then were men who had to be able to handle drills freely and easily without fear on intricate work to get to their places. Engineers were consulted. All advised against tackling such an insurmountable problem.

Finally, at the suggestion of the inventor Lester Barlow, The Brown Hoist Machinery Company of Cleveland, Barlow’s firm, sent two of its best engineers to Stone Mountain. They went into the matter in great detail. They evolved a grandiose plan for a steel mechanism 550 feet high, with sliding platforms and elevators to carry the workers to their stations. The cost of this structure was set at $200,000, not too much, probably, but far beyond the reach of the sponsors of the project.

The sculptor, however, was undaunted. He devised a strong leather harness with a seat attached, to be buckled around the waist, in which a man could sit and push himself around by his feet, leaving his hands free to use drills or paintbrush. The harness was attached to a steel cable fastened at the other end to a winch or wheel hoist, which could be operated by one man turning the wheel so the worker could be pulled up or let down as was necessary. The winches were firmly anchored to the stone.

By this device the sculptor could and did go all over the face of the cliff, exploring the surface imperfections. Tucker got a bad jolt doing it in the dark. Even Governor Trinkle of Virginia proved--to the terror of his wife watching from below--that he too could go adventuring over the rock. By adding more platforms on which carvers could stand securely and on which stepladders could be placed to increase their reach, it was found that men could soon learn to carve as comfortably as in a studio on the ground.

The sculptor had gone back to Stamford to work on sketches and models for the carving when the First World War intervened. The government needed all the engineers in the country. Jesse Tucker joined the army and went overseas. Gutzon took up the aircraft investigation. The project of Stone Mountain came to a stop. Work on it was to be delayed for some eight years.