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In 1920, Doane Robinson, State Historian, had a dream. He wanted to see a monument carved in the rock of the Black Hills. Gutzon Borglum was working on a Civil War sculpture in Georgia when Robinson contacted him. After a clash with the Georgia project, Borglum moved to Keystone and begun working in the fall of 1925. When Borglum died in 1941, his son Lincoln Borglum continued work on Mount Rushmore until WWII.

Mount Rushmore was named for Charles E Rushmore, a New York lawyer, who owned mining property in the area. The presidents honored in the monument include: George Washington (dedicated in 1930), Thomas Jefferson (dedicated in 1936), Theodore Roosevelt (dedicated in 1939), and Abraham Lincoln (dedicated in 1937).