Back to the Table of Contents Page

Back to the Weekly Home Page

Classifieds

Publication Date: Friday, July 20, 2001

The making of Mount Rushmore

As a youth of 18, Ted Crawford got a bird's eye view of the making of the grandest memorials to America's history - the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

During the summers of 1938 and 1939, Crawford, now 82, was one of the workers on the massive stone carving project designed by visionary sculptor Gutzon Borglum. He spoke Tuesday at the Pleasanton Library about some of his experiences. Crawford said that nearly 400 people worked on the giant sculptures Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt from 1929 through 1941, when work was suspended, permanently as it turned out, after Borglum's death. But he did little of the actual drilling, himself, he added, instead mostly directing those who operated iron winches that raised and lowered the carvers in harnesses or two-men buckets.

"I sat on top of Lincoln's head and moved (each worker) wherever he needed to be," Crawford explained, by receiving hand-signals from the workers and relaying the information to the winch operators by microphone.

Crawford's reminiscences accompanied a showing of a 1994 video on the creation of Mount Rushmore for the library's Mature Adult Programs, or MAP, which feature monthly travelogues and historical presentations. A retired pharmaceutical salesman, Crawford has lived in Pleasanton for 26 years.

"My starting salary was 65 cents an hour and I thought I was rich," Crawford told his audience of some 50 senior citizens. Employment at Rushmore was seasonal because it was too difficult to cut and drill stone in the winter months. "And if you saw a cloud come up with any threat of thunder or lightning, work was through for the day."

Workers had to climb up 733 steps to work on the mountain each day and 733 back down. "Believe me, we kept in good shape," he joked. Before Crawford joined the Rushmore crew, workers would be carried up in a bucket, but this stopped after a cable broke injuring some workers. Amazingly, however, no deaths or serious injuries occurred during the entire Rushmore construction as workers drilled and dynamited away half million tons of rock.

Like many of the other workers, even those who drilled and carved with jackhammers, Crawford had no prior experience in working with stone. Instead his entrŽe to employment was his pitching arm.

"Basically I got my job because I could play baseball," Crawford said. The Borglums were keen to have a quality baseball team, he explained, and several who were already working at Rushmore knew of his pitching success on another team at the time.

Crawford fondly recalls the Rushmore baseball triumphs.

"In 1939 we got through the semifinals and then got beat," he recalled, referring to the culminating games for the 34 South Dakota teams at the time. "But along the way we beat the favored team which was considered the most perfect sports event of that year in South Dakota, so we were pretty proud of that."

Contributions from school children throughout South Dakota started the private donations for the project, all matched by federal dollars. But what kept it going was the sculptor's political skills despite his confrontational style.

"All the time the project was going on, Gutzon Borglum had the ability to go to senators and get the money," he said. "He was as much a politician as a sculptor."

As an example, Crawford recalled that one senator promised to get Borlgum more money if he would put buttons on George Washington's chest.

"Borglum wouldn't do it," he said. "He knew he could get the money anyway."

It was an ability lacking in his son, Lincolm Borglum, who oversaw most of the day-to-day work of the project, said Crawford. Further complicated by the onset of World War II, the project closed down six months after the elder Borglum died in 1941. The sculptor had plans to create a massive document depository inside the mountain, but his son was unable to get the Rushmore project restarted after the war ended.

The monument was finally commemorated 50 years later in 1991 by then President George Bush.