A stunning theory claims that the Americas were discovered in Antiquity

Credit: thevintagenews

Among the many theories about which civilization first sailed to the Americas and discovered them, there is also the theory that the ancient Phoenicians were the first.

This theory became popular in the 18th century and is closely connected with the petroglyphs on Dighton Rock which are still of unknown origin. This theory is not quite as popular as the one that says that the Norse made the discovery first, but still, it is worth mentioning.

Back in the 18th century, a lot of scholars started to offer ideas about the true origin of the inscriptions on the rock. Ezra Stiles, a theologian, author, and also the seventh President of Yale College, claimed that the inscriptions are in Hebrew. Antoine Court de Gébelin, who is mainly known for the popularization of the Tarot, had his own idea about the rock. He believed that the inscription was made by Carthaginian sailors who commemorated their journey to the shores of Massachusetts.

A copy of the symbols on Dighton Rock.

In the 19th century, the theory that a group of Israelite people visited the New World was widely adopted in the Mormon community.

Later, Ross T. Christensen, an American archeologist, speculated that the Mulekites, who are mentioned in the Book of Mormon, were probably of Phoenician ethnic origin.


The Phoenician theory is also supported in a book written in 1871, by John Denison Baldwin, an American anthropologist. In Ancient America, Baldwin wrote,

“The known enterprise of the Phoenician race, and this ancient knowledge of America, so variously expressed, strongly encourage the hypothesis that the people called Phoenicians came to this continent, established colonies in the region where ruined cities are found, and filled it with civilized life. It is argued that they made voyages on the ‘great exterior ocean,’ and that such navigators must have crossed the Atlantic; and it is added that symbolic devices similar to those of the Phoenicians are found in the American ruins, and that an old tradition of the native Mexicans and Central Americans described the first civilizers as ‘bearded white men,’ who ‘came from the East in ships’.“

Photograph of the Dighton Rock taken in 1893.

A stone tablet with an inscription that was supposed to be of Phoenician origin appeared in Brazil in the 1870s. The tablet was given to Ladislau de Souza Mello Netto, who was the director of the National Museum of Brazil at that time, and he immediately acknowledged the artifact as genuine. The inscription allegedly told the story of some Sidonian Canaanites who visited the shore of Brazil. It was later discovered that the symbols that appear on the tablet were variations of letters that appeared in different periods over a span of 800 years. It was impossible for all the letters to appear on the same tablet at the same time, so the artifact and the inscription were dismissed as fake.

In the 20th century, a few new artifacts appeared that again spiked the theory of Phoenician or Semitic discovery. One of these artifacts was the Bat Creek inscription. Cyrus Herzl Gordon, Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages expert, believed that the inscription of this tablet was in Paleo-Hebrew. Gordon thought that this was proof that Semitic people visited the continent prior to Columbus. Later, the Bat Creek inscription, together with another artifact called the Las Lunas Decalogue Stone, were proven to be forgeries and Gordon’s claim was dismissed.

The Bat Creek inscription.

In 1996, Mark McMenamin, an American paleontologist, speculated that Phoenician sailors visited the Americas around 350 BC. He based his theory on some gold stater coins that were allegedly made by the state of Carthage. On the back of the coins was a map of the Mediterranean and another land on the west, across the Atlantic. McMenamin interpreted that land as the Americas but later discovered that those coins were actually a modern forgery.

Another form of written evidence that slightly goes in favor of the arrival of Phoenicians in the Americas can be found in Ptolemy’s Geography. Lucio Russo, an Italian physicist, mathematician, and historian of science, analyzed Ptolemy’s book and noticed that he gives the coordinates of the Fortunate Isles.

The fortunate Islands were a group of legendary islands mentioned by various ancient Greek writers. Russo also noticed that the size of the world in Ptolemy’s Geography is smaller than what Eratosthenes measured. After he gave the same coordinates of the Fortunate Islands to the Antilles, the map irregularities in Ptolemy’s descriptions disappeared. According to Russo, Ptolemy could have known about the Antilles from his source, Hipparcos, who lived in Rhodes. It is possible that Hipparcos heard about the Antilles from Phoenicians sailors who controlled the western Mediterranean in those days. This is a far-fetched idea, but still, an interesting one.

A carving of a Phoenician ship / Photo source

Most of the modern-day scholars deny the idea that Phoenicians, Canaanites, or Carthaginians discovered the Americas first.

Read another story from us: A Phoenician merchant ship: Answers at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

Ronald H. Fritze, an American historian, says that although it was technically possible for those people to reach the Americas, it probably never happened:

“No archaeological evidence has yet been discovered to prove the contentions of Irwin, Gordon, Bailey, Fell and others. Since even the fleeting Norse presence in Vinland left definite archaeological remains at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, it seems logical that the allegedly more extensive Phoenician and Carthaginian presence would have left similar evidence. The absence of such remains is strong circumstantial evidence that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians never reached the Americas.”

Until some concrete evidence appears, this theory will remain only a fantasy

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Thevintagenews . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A country at the crossroads: how Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War

An 1860 presidential election campaign banner for Abraham Lincoln and his running partner, Hannibal Hamlin. (Library of Congress)

What was the political prelude to the 1860 election?

Ever since the drafting of America’s federal constitution of 1787, the question of slavery had given rise to political contention and compromise. In the early years of the new American nation, several northern states adopted statutes of emancipation, while new technology and the international demand for cotton gave slave labour deep roots in the south. Plantation agriculture spread from the Atlantic states into the Gulf region. As a result, slave numbers would grow to four million by 1860.

Most Americans deemed that the constitution gave individual slave states alone the right to determine the future of their ‘peculiar institution’. However, the westward movement of settlers and the extension of the nation’s boundaries – through the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, and the wresting of California and other parts of Mexico by force – prompted periodic crises over the status of slaveholding in the territories and the new states carved out of them. 

In 1820 and again in 1850 threats of civil war between North and South prompted compromise, while the Democrats and Whigs – the dominant national parties during the 1830s and 1840s – worked in the main to keep the issue at bay. But in the 1850s it arose again. By then growing intransigence, and each faction’s sense of its moral and social superiority, put political compromise beyond easy reach.

Why does the presidential election of 1860 matter?

Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 as the Republican candidate for the White House forever changed the relationship between the American government and the institution of slavery. 

It wasn’t that Lincoln was the first nominee for the presidency to run on an antislavery platform. Minority parties, alarmed by the increasing entrenchment of plantation slavery, had fielded emancipationists in every presidential election since 1840, and in 1856 the newly formed Republican Party had celebrated a powerful showing on a manifesto committed to containing slavery – a “relic of barbarism” – within existing limits. But the real turning-point came four years later when, for the first time in the history of the American republic, an antislavery candidate committed to putting slavery in the way of ultimate extinction triumphed in the electoral college.


Lincoln’s success prompted South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union. At a special secession convention on 20 December the state declared she had taken her place “once again amongst the nations of the world”. Within two months, six other states of the lower South had joined her in forming an independent confederacy. The US constitution dictated that the outgoing president, the Democrat James Buchanan, remain in office between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th president on 4 March 1861. ‘Old Buck’ lacked both the authority and will to defuse the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. Its resolution would depend on the wisdom and courage of his successor.

Abraham Lincoln. The election of a candidate committed to ending a “relic of barbarism” incensed the slave-holding South. (Library of Congress)

Who were the 
Republicans?

Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska 
Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level ‘anti-Nebraska’ coalitions of 
disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent ‘free-soilers’, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many 
of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties. 
 

This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), U.S. territories (green), and Kansas in center (white). Credit: wikipedia

The emergent Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound 
its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters – the so-called ‘Slave Power’ that had allegedly hijacked the federal government. 

By 1860 the party of ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ had broadened its platform to embrace homesteads for western settlers, a protective tariff and 
a Pacific railroad. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located its strength in “the great middling-interest class”, men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom”. Republicans made much of their role as the party 
of conscience, and as such appealed successfully to ‘nativist’ anti-Catholics, while also winning support within influential communities of Protestant and radical immigrants, above all 
the Germans.

Why did the Republican Party choose Lincoln as 
its candidate?

Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. 

Portrait of William H. Seward, Secretary of State 1861-69 Credit: wikipedia

But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an “irrepressible conflict”, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North (Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois) who had previously blocked the party’s route to power?

Seward’s supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention and, by holding his own against the Democratic ‘Little Giant’, the respect of antislavery voters. More recently, his well-crafted Cooper Union speech in New York City alerted easterners to the intellectual sophistication and moral backbone of a westerner they had not before encountered in the flesh. “He’s the greatest man since St Paul,” a newspaperman declared. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” 

Adamant that to restrict slavery was to sustain the purposes of the nation’s founders and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but insistent on the constitutional rights of the southern states to the protection of their “domestic institutions”, and personally untainted by nativism, Lincoln offered a blend of moral radicalism and legal conservatism that allowed his managers at Chicago to present him as the party’s most reliable hope in the doubtful states. Rational political logic, not luck, secured his nomination.

Why did the Democratic Party split?

Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglas’s formula of ‘popular sovereignty’ – leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote – kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in ‘bleeding’ Kansas or President Buchanan’s feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglas’s political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration. 


Even so, as the country’s leading Democrat he expected to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dred Scott case (which declared slave-owners’ property rights sacrosanct), had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The party’s fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way. 

The leading Democrat, Stephen A Douglas. He failed to prevent his party splitting over the issue of slavery. (Library of Congress)

Why didn’t Lincoln run in the South?

Southern nervousness over the rise of an antislavery party boiled over in the fall of 1859 following the misbegotten attempt of the abolitionist John Brown to spur a slave uprising by seizing the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horrified southern leaders denounced the ‘Black Republicans’ as fomenters of racial revolution. But the Republicans cast themselves as the genuinely national party, loyal to the intentions of the nation’s founders and true to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. This was a self-perception reinforced by the polemical writings of a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South attributed the condition of impoverished southern whites and the backwardness of their economy to slavery’s corrosive effect on enterprise and opportunity. 


The book became a mainstay of Republican propagandists in 1860. Southern authorities banned it, while vigilantes murdered or drove out those who preached its doctrines. Lincoln’s party put up candidates in some of the states of the slave border region, and Lincoln himself earned several thousand votes in border slave states such as Missouri and Delaware, but did not risk life and limb in the lower South, where no Republicans appeared on the ballot.

Slaves in a cotton field near Savannah, Georgia in the c1860s. (Corbis)

Did the Democrats’ schism hand the election to the Republicans?

Lincoln won the presidency with a mere 40 per cent of the popular vote, seven per cent less than the combined ballots of his two Democrat rivals. But the split in the Democratic Party did not itself deliver the Republican victory, for Lincoln secured clear majorities in almost every free state, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts and the other populous states where the presidential electors were concentrated. Even as a combined force, the opposition parties would not have won. 

Lincoln easily dominated the electoral college, with 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72 and Douglas’s 12. 
A fourth candidate for the presidency, John Bell, appealing to conservative voters who had lost their political home with the death of the old Whig party, won just 39. More significant than the Democrats’ schism in opening the door to Lincoln’s victory was the Republicans’ success in putting a squeeze on Bell’s Constitutional Union party in the lower North. 

Did Lincoln’s election warrant the secession of southern states?

Southern nationalist ‘fire-eaters’ moved quickly to mobilise support for secession from a Union that had elected a ‘Black Republican’ on a purely sectional vote. Jumpy southern whites believed that an abolitionist in the White House would use the levers of government to bring about the revolution that had eluded John Brown. For their part, southern conservatives cautioned against hasty action that smacked of both panic and hubris. 
As South Carolina led the charge towards separation, a dyspeptic realist, James Pettigru, remarked that the state was too small for a republic, yet too large for a lunatic asylum. 


Prudent slave-owners pointed out that the Republicans were no immediate menace to the South: the party controlled neither Congress nor the Supreme Court, and Lincoln was anyway no radical abolitionist. They were correct in judging immediate secession a far riskier course than waiting for an overt act of aggression from the new administration in Washington. Southern radicals, however, confident in the Cotton Kingdom’s capacity to sustain itself at home and abroad, exploited the fevered times and carried the day. Above all, they played on fears that the new president would stock the slave-states with federal post-holders – a nucleus of antislavery fifth-columnists dedicated to effecting a political and racial revolution throughout the region. 

A contemporary oil painting of a US slave market in 1852. By this time, the issue of slavery had already driven America to the brink of civil war on two occasions. (Bridgeman Art Library)

What part did the election outcome play in the coming of civil war?

War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a ‘perpetual’ Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”

The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institution’s future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican cession (1848) had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860. 

Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 1861–65 was not about ‘state’s rights’ in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their ‘domestic institutions’. 


No one explained this better than Lincoln himself, a month before his assassination. The slaves, he said, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” The election of 1860 was at the heart of this story.  

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Historyextra . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The discovery that overturns all knowledge of geography. It was found a new continent Called 'Zealandia'

Topography of Zealandia. The linear ridges running north-northeast and southwest away from New Zealand are not considered part of the continental fragment, nor are Australia (upper left), Fiji or Vanuatu (top centre). Credit: wikipedia

Kids are frequently taught that seven continents exist: Africa, Asia, Antarctica, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Geologists, who look at the rocks (and tend to ignore the humans), group Europe and Asia into its own supercontinent - Eurasia - making for a total of six geologic continents.

But according to a new study of Earth's crust, there's a seventh geologic continent called 'Zealandia', and it has been hiding under our figurative noses for millennia.

Make-up of the 4.9 M km 2 continent of Zealandia in the SW Pacific

The 11 researchers behind the study argue that New Zealand and New Caledonia aren't merely an island chain.

Instead, they're both part of a single, 4.9-million-square kilometre (1.89 million-square-mile) slab of continental crust that's distinct from Australia.

"This is not a sudden discovery but a gradual realisation; as recently as 10 years ago we would not have had the accumulated data or confidence in interpretation to write this paper," they wrote in GSA Today, a Geological Society of America journal.

Ten of the researchers work for organisations or companies within the new continent; one works for a university in Australia.

Zealandia: Earth's Hidden ContinentThis City Knows  Urban Trekkers

But other geologists are almost certain to accept the research team's continent-size conclusions, says Bruce Luyendyk, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (he wasn't involved in the study).


"These people here are A-list earth scientists," Luyendyk tells Business Insider.


"I think they have put together a solid collection of evidence that's really thorough. I don't see that there's going to be a lot of pushback, except maybe around the edges."

Why Zealandia is almost certainly a new continent

N. Mortimer et al./GSA Today

The concept of Zealandia isn't new. In fact, Luyendyk coined the word in 1995.

But Luyendyk says it was never intended to describe a new continent. Rather, the name was used to describe New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a collection of submerged pieces and slices of crust that broke off a region of Gondwana, a 200 million-year-old supercontinent.

"The reason I came up with this term is out of convenience," Luyendyk says.

"They're pieces of the same thing when you look at Gondwana. So I thought, 'why do you keep naming this collection of pieces as different things?'"

Researchers behind the new study took Luyendyk's idea a huge step further, re-examining known evidence under four criteria that geologists use to deem a slab of rock a continent:

Land that pokes up relatively high from the ocean floor

• A diversity of three types of rocks: igneous (spewed by volcanoes), metamorphic (altered by heat/pressure), and sedimentary (made by erosion)

• A thicker, less-dense section of crust compared to surrounding ocean floor

• "Well-defined limits around a large enough area to be considered a continent rather than a microcontinent or continental fragment"

Over the past few decades, geologists had already determined that New Zealand and New Caledonia fit the bill for items 1, 2, and 3.

After all, they're large islands that poke up from the sea floor, are geologically diverse, and are made of thicker, less-dense crust.

This eventually led to Luyendyk's coining of Zealandia, and the description of the region as 'continental', since it was considered a collection of microcontinents, or bits and pieces of former continents.

The authors say the last item on the list - a question of "is it big enough and unified enough to be its own thing?" - is one that other researchers skipped over in the past, though by no fault of their own.

Journey to Zealandia, Earth's Hidden 8th Continent

At a glance, Zealandia seemed broken-up. But the new study used recent and detailed satellite-based elevation and gravity maps of the ancient seafloor to show that Zealandia is indeed part of one unified region.

The data also suggests Zealandia spans "approximately the area of greater India", or larger than Madagascar, New Guinea, Greenland, or other microcontinents and provinces.

"If the elevation of Earth's solid surface had first been mapped in the same way as those of Mars and Venus (which lack […] opaque liquid oceans)," they wrote.

"We contend that Zealandia would, much earlier, have been investigated and identified as one of Earth's continents."

The geologic devils in the details

The study's authors point out that while India is big enough to be a continent, and probably used to be, it's now part of Eurasia because it collided and stuck to that continent millions of years ago.

Zealandia, meanwhile, has not yet smashed into Australia; a piece of seafloor called the Cato Trough still separates the two continents by 25 kilometres (15.5 miles).

N. Mortimer et al./GSA Today

One thing that makes the case for Zealandia tricky is its division into northern and southern segments by two tectonic plates: the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate.

This split makes the region seem more like a bunch of continental fragments than a unified slab.

But the researchers point out that Arabia, India, and parts of Central America have similar divisions, yet are still considered parts of larger continents.

"I'm from California, and it has a plate boundary going through it," Luyendyk says.

"In millions of years, the western part will be up near Alaska. Does that make it not part of North America? No."

What's more, the researchers wrote, rock samples suggest Zealandia is made of the same continental crust that used to be part of Gondwana, and that it migrated in ways similar to the continents Antarctica and Australia.

The samples and satellite data also show Zealandia is not broken up as a collection of microcontinents, but a unified slab.

Instead, plate tectonics has thinned, stretched, and submerged Zealandia over of millions of years. Today, only about 5 percent of it is visible as the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia - which is part of the reason it took so long to discover.

"The scientific value of classifying Zealandia as a continent is much more than just an extra name on a list," the scientists wrote.

"That a continent can be so submerged yet unfragmented makes it a useful and thought-provoking geodynamic end member in exploring the cohesion and breakup of continental crust."

Luyendyk believes the distinction won't likely end up as a scientific curiosity, however, and speculated that it may eventually have larger consequences.

"The economic implications are clear and come into play: What's part of New Zealand and what's not part of New Zealand?" he says.

Indeed, United Nations agreements make specific mentions of continental shelves as boundaries that determine where resources can be extracted - and New Zealand may have tens of billions of dollars' worth of fossil fuels and minerals lurking off its shores.

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Secret room of the famous Rushmore

After its completion 75 years ago, the colossal presidential sculpture carved into Mount Rushmore quickly became an American icon. However, few know that hidden behind the hairline of Abraham Lincoln is a doorway to an unfinished chamber originally intended to hold some of America’s most treasured documents.

On Halloween in 1941, the 14-year effort to carve the enormous profiles of four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—into the southeastern face of Mount Rushmore was finally completed. However, one little-known, but critical, element of Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s “Shrine of Democracy Sculpture” was left unfinished and remains concealed from view behind Lincoln’s mighty brow.

Mount Rushmore as carving began with conceptual drawing of Borglum’s idea for a the never-built entablature inserted. (Credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

Carved into the solid granite wall of a small canyon running right behind the presidential lineup is an 18-foot-tall doorway that resembles the entrance to an ancient tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. While Nicolas Cage’s character in the movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” discovered the entrance to a legendary city of gold inside a cave on Mount Rushmore, no such riches can be found in the actual chamber chiseled into the mountain. Anyone crossing the threshold would discover an empty room approximately 75 feet in length with a 35-foot-tall ceiling. Holes jack-hammered into the walls to hold dynamite for blasting lend a honeycomb effect. Red numbers, perhaps painted by Borglum himself, give instructions for the removal of rocks.

Gutzon Borglum (Credit: Library of Congress)

Borglum had intended for this incomplete chamber to be, in essence, his artist’s statement explaining the meaning of his sculpture—not for present generations but for future civilizations, and even interplanetary visitors, thousands of years in the future. “You might as well drop a letter into the world’s postal service without an address or signature, as to send that carved mountain into history without identification,” the sculptor wrote. While the four faces carved on Mount Rushmore are instantly recognizable even to school kids today, Borglum thought they might one day become as mysterious as Stonehenge. “Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor,” he lamented. “Civilizations are ghouls.”

The sculptor’s early plans for Mount Rushmore included next to Washington’s head a massive 80-by-120-foot inscription in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase that would list nine of the most important events in the history of the United States between 1776 and 1906. However, even with the most astronomical of point sizes, the text would not have been legible at great distances, and ultimately logistics required that portion of the mountain to be used for Lincoln’s head. Borglum abandoned the inscription and instead drew up plans to build a repository deep within the mountain that would hold some of America’s most treasured artifacts and documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Plans for the Hall of Records. (Credit: Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

The sculptor envisioned a grand, 800-foot-long staircase ascending Mount Rushmore that would lead to a glorious chamber called the “Hall of Records.” “Into this room the records of what our people aspired to and what they accomplished should be collected,” Borglum wrote, “and on the walls of this room should be cut the literal record of conception of our republic; its successful creation; the record of its westward movement to the Pacific; its presidents; how the Memorial was built, and frankly, why.”

Visitors to the Hall of Records would enter through great glass doors over which would be perched a bronze eagle with a 38-foot wingspan and the inscription “America’s Onward March.” A cross pointing to the North Star would be mounted upon the vaulted ceiling, and friezes on the wall would depict “the adventure of humanity discovering and occupying the West World.” An inscription written by John Edward Bradley, who won a national contest sponsored by the Hearst newspapers, would detail the history of the country from its founding through the construction of the Panama Canal. Bronze and glass cabinets in the recesses of the 80-by-100-foot chamber would hold documents such as the U.S. Constitution. There would be busts of more than 20 prominent Americans, ranging from Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock to Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.

Workers in the early stages of constructing the Hall of Records. (Credit: Charles D’Emery photo, courtesy of NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

In July 1938, workers began to cut into the rock on the north wall of a small canyon concealed by the presidential faces to build Borglum’s American shrine. However, a year into the construction, the federal government, which covered nearly all the cost of constructing the monument, tightened the pursestrings and ordered Borglum to stop work on the Hall of Records and focus his full efforts on completing the presidential profiles.

Seven months after the 73-year-old sculptor died in March 1941, Borglum’s son Lincoln led the effort to finish the carving of the four presidents. The Mount Rushmore National Monument was deemed to be complete, although Borglum’s ultimate plan—and the Hall of Records—remained unfinished.

Mount Rushmore under construction. (Credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

Borglum’s hopes for the Hall of Records were at least partially fulfilled on August 9, 1998, when four generations of his family gathered in the incomplete chamber as 16 porcelain enamel panels inscribed with the words of documents such as the Declaration of Independence, biographies of the sculptor and his presidential subjects and histories of the memorial’s construction and the United States were placed inside a teakwood box and titanium vault that was lowered into the ground and covered by a 1,200-pound black granite capstone inscribed with a quote from Borglum delivered at the 1930 dedication of the carving of Washington. “It’s the end of the creation of Mount Rushmore as my father saw it,” said Borglum’s daughter, Mary Ellis.

It’s one part of Mount Rushmore, however, that few people can see today. Due to safety and security concerns, visitors are prohibited from scaling the mountain to view the Hall of Records.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by History . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.