North Carolina State Monument (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) to purchase and landscape the site and to commission Gutzon Borglum, who was approached while working on Mount Rushmore. Borglum designed the monument in Texas and posed the Confederate flag designer (Orren Smith) as the flag bearer, while the other soldiers were sculpted from photographs of posed Confederate soldiers. Postponed from May 1929, the US Navy and 6th Field Artillery bands played at the monument's dedicationon July 3, 1929. By 1949, a glass-faced display at the site, and a wooden marker for the site was cut down by vandals in 1954. President Kennedy left his car to visit the monument
Construction of Mount Rushmore at least there be two Republicans and at least one Democrat represented) because of Theodore Roosevelt's introduction of the National Park Service. Borglum's original design was a sculpture of each president intended to go down to their waists, but time constraints and funding only provided for their heads. Ivan Houser, father of John Sherrill Houser, was assistant sculptor to Gutzon Borglum during the early years of carving; he began working with Borglum shortly after the inception of the monument and was with Borglum for a total of seven years. When Houser left Gutzon to devote his talents to his own