Mt. Rushmore’s Lincoln Borglum Dies

Lincoln Borglum, who helped his father carve presidential portraits into Mt. Rushmore, died Monday. He was 73 and died in a Corpus Christi hospital of what was described only as a long illness.

Lincoln Borglum joined his father, Gutzon Borglum, to chisel and blast the faces of four Presidents into the 6,200-foot peak. He was considered the principal sculptor of the Abraham Lincoln carving.

The younger Borglum also wrote a book titled “Mt. Rushmore: The Unfinished Dream” and lectured to raise money to install a record room behind the faces at Mt. Rushmore to explain the world’s largest sculpture.

Lincoln Borglum came to South Dakota’s Black Hills at age 12 and worked on the national memorial from age 17 until he was 29. He also helped put the finishing touches on the huge sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt after his father died in 1941.

The younger Borglum moved to south Texas 15 years ago, where he raised cattle and tried to stimulate interest in a Mt. Rushmore Hall of History that would be dug into a cave on the mountain. It would contain, he said, not just a history of the Presidents on the mountain but “a hall of records where we (would) put some of our better inventions to help future civilizations rebuild should ours be lost.

”. . . If we don’t finish it, someday Mt. Rushmore will be a mystery like the heads on Easter Island.”