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Stone Mountain
Located in the Dekalb county east of Atlanta, Stone Mountain is the city's most prominent natural landmark. Until the late nineteenth century, it was generally known as Rock Mountain or the New Gibralter. The name of the town was changed to Stone Mountain in 1847.Nevertheless, it is said that there was a settlement at Stone Mountain long before there was a house at Decatur, an old residential neighborhood east of Atlanta. As early as 1825, a stage coach line ran from Stone Mountain to Athens, Tennessee. And even in those days the mountain was an object of keen interest to tourists.The Stone Mountain is the world's largest monolithic granite rock. In 1830, an aricle published in Macon Telegraph described this outstanding natural wonder as follows: "The Stone Mountain is a huge solid peak of solitary rock, three thousand feet in height, and six or seven miles in circumference. |
The finest view of this stupendous pyramid is obtained from the eastern side. Seen from this point at a distance, it has the appearance of large dark cloud streaked with thunder and lightening. Approach it nearer, and its figure and consistence become distinguishable; you see the bold, naked rock, nearly globular in form, of a darkish gray color." Upon this bold and naked surface, Sculptor Gutzon Burglum carved the statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and General Stonewall Jackson.
The origins of the idea for a Confederate Memorial are historically vague and is said to have been suggested by William H. Terrell, a member of the Atlanta bar, Mrs. Helen Plane, widow of a confederate officer and founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the noted journalist John Temple Graves. In 1912, Mrs. Plane began to push for the construction of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial. |
In 1915, the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association commissioned the New York Sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, who visited the site and was immediately taken by the steep side of Stone Mountain. His envisioned a far more epic memorial than merely a bust of General Lee, as Mrs. Payne had earlier suggested. According to him, " it seems to me that the only fitting memorial to the South of 1861-65 by the equally great South of today, is to reconstruct as best we can the great characters of those days, and in colossal proportions, carve them in high and full relief, in action, mounted and on foot, moving across the granite mountain in the arrangement of two wings of an army, following the mountain contours, moving naturally across its face to the East...It will stand alone in memorial and monumental work in the world, the impressiveness of the plan, the natural groupings of the men and horses, moving forward with expectancy, represented in all their fitness, would revive all that was best in those heroic hours, and give to posterity a true representation of those great Americans." (as cited in Atlanta and its Environs) The fact that Stone Mountain was a private property never hindered the fifty year long construction of the memorial. In these fifty years, Borglum's initial idea was refined by Augustus Lukeman, who produced a different layout claiming that Burglum's design could not be used because of the surface of the mountain. He removed the heads of Lee and Jackson to accomodate his design which was smaller in scale and was also less intricate. It was Walker Hancock who finally completed Lukeman's design and the memorial was unveiled in 1972. Hancock's crew, which comprised several quarrymen rather than artists, used thermo-torch equipment to finally accomplish the daunting task of carving the face of Stone Mountain in order to depict the glory of the Confederate South.
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