This vintage postcard shows the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota as it looked in 1949.
On October 4, 1927, Gutzon Borglum and his crew began work on what is today known as Mount Rushmore. They carved into a cliff in a mountain of the Black Hills the heads of four former U.S. presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. This was a tremendous engineering feat as well as an artistic adventure of the grandest magnitude. This postcard of Mt. Rushmore shows the view soon after the work was finished on October 31, 1941.
This mountain was originally known as Six Grandfathers (Sakpe Tunkasila) to the Lakota Sioux. It was renamed to Mount Rushmore, after Charles E. Rushmore, a prominent New York lawyer, during an expedition in 1885.
This vintage postcard gives a very bright and pristine view of Mount Rushmore in the 1940’s. Today, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the Black Hills National Forest are still great places to visit when out to see the U.S.A. The National Parks Department has maintained the Black Hills area so that the forests, mountains, and streams are beautiful.