Georgia
If the presidential carvings on South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore are masterpieces on a grand scale, it may be because the sculptor got to practice on Georgia’s Stone Mountain. This granite dome in north central Georgia is home to the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, immortalizing three Confederate war heroes: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, on their favorite horses, Little Sorrel, Traveller, and Blackjack, respectively.
At an elevation of 1688 feet, Stone Mountain looms 825 feet above the ground, with a circumference of five miles at its base. The landmark is easy to spot from the air just east of Atlanta.
Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore are both made of granite, igneous rock that erupts underground, where it cools slowly and forms large crystals that make the rock exceptionally hard. Stone Mountain is a granite formation known as a quartz monzonite dome monadnock; the quartz monzonite refers to the high mineral quantities of orthoclase and plagioclase feldspars that give the rock a smooth, light gray texture. A monadnock is an isolated mountain that rises abruptly from the surrounding landscape.
The rock was formed five to ten miles underground between 300 and 350 million years ago, during one of the uplift stages of the Appalachian Mountain chain. It was likely exposed to the surface by erosion sometime in the last 15 million years. The mountain that appears at the surface is only the tip of the iceberg; a mass of granite continues underground for nine miles to the north and east, extending into the next county.
Depicted in relief on the side of Stone Mountain, the Confederate Memorial Carving is slightly smaller than two football fields, reaching four hundred feet above ground and measuring ninety feet high and nearly two hundred feet wide. At its deepest point, the bas-relief is carved forty-two feet into the mountain. The carving was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1916 and started by Gutzon Borglum, who would abandon the project in 1925 to move his talents to Mount Rushmore. Originally, Borglum conceived of the carving as a parade of gigantic figures encircling the mountain, but the three figures on horseback alone took more than fifty years to complete and the project was never expanded.
Stone Mountain has been owned by the state of Georgia since 1958 and is operated today as a visitor attraction. Guests can ride to the top of the mountain on the Summit Skyride (a high-speed cable car that passes the carving on the way up) or hike to the top on a steep path just over a mile long that ascends 786 feet to the summit. From the top, the city skyline of Atlanta is visible to the west.
The Confederate Memorial Carving on the side of Stone Mountain is the world’s largest bas-relief carving.
You could fly over Stone Mountain en route to Atlanta, Georgia.
