What Does Mount Rushmore Really Look Like from Behind? the Truth Behind the Viral Images
While the mountain has no stone buttocks, it does hold an authentic secret chamber. Between 1938 and 1939, Gutzon Borglum set out to construct a massive repository called the Hall of Records. He intended it to preserve foundational documents of American civilization, ensuring future generations or distant civilizations could comprehend why the faces were carved.
Borglum dreamed of an eighty-by-one-hundred-foot hall accessed by an eighty-foot stone staircase cut through the canyon behind the heads. The blueprint called for bronze-encased cabinets holding the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and historic records documenting American territorial expansion. Workers blasted a 70-foot-deep tunnel into the rock wall of a hidden canyon directly behind Abraham Lincoln.
Congress intervened in 1939. Lawmakers demanded that federal funding remain focused entirely on finishing the heads rather than excavating an underground museum. When Borglum died in March 1941 and American industrial resources mobilized for World War II, all construction stopped. The Hall of Records remained a rough, gated opening in the rock for nearly six decades.
The project finally reached partial completion on August 9, 1998. Officials placed 16 porcelain enamel panels, inscribed with historical texts, biographies of the four presidents, and Borglum's monument construction history, inside a teakwood case. That case was sealed inside a titanium vault, capped by a 1,200-pound granite ledger stone, and set into the floor of the tunnel entry. Visitors cannot enter this chamber today; it remains securely locked behind heavy iron gates and security cameras.
