Post-presidency of George Washington 21, 1885. In 1923, historian Doane Robinson had developed an idea to make a gigantic sculpture on the Black Hills of South Dakota. Robinson hired renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum for the job. Borglum, at the time, was making a Confederate memorial on Stone Mountain. Borglum searched for a mountain suitable for his project and he found Mount Rushmore, composed of granite, named after a New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore. Four prominent presidents were chosen for the sculptor to bring national recognition, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Washington was chosen to represent a "light for
Gutzon Borglum His father, Jens Møller Haugaard Børglum (1839–1909), had two wives when he lived in Idaho: Gutzon's mother, Christina Mikkelsen Borglum (1847–1871) and Gutzon's mother's sister Ida, who was Jens's first wife. Jens Borglum decided to leave Mormonism and moved to Omaha, Nebraska where polygamy was both illegal and taboo. Jens Borglum worked mainly as a woodcarver before leaving Idaho to attend the Saint Louis Homeopathic Medical College in Saint Louis, Missouri. At that point "Jens and Christina divorced, the family left the Mormon church, and Jens, Ida, their children, and Christina's two sons, Gutzon and Solon, moved to St. Louis,