It's spring training on Throwback Thursday, Otto “Red” Anderson from Mellette SD went to work at Mount Rushmore in the summer of 1929, at the age of 27. Otto initially worked on the fireplaces in the first Studio. After the fireplace job, Red became a rough-driller at .55 cents/hour. Otto first met Borglum down in the studio. Borglum was up working on the model and started down the ladder, jumped the rest of the way and noticed a “Bull Durham” tag hanging out of “Reds” pocket. Borglum came up to “Red” and said, “Hey how about rolling me a cigarette.” This was the first meeting and he believed he established a rapport with Borglum over a cigarette. On Sundays, it was baseball day in Keystone and Red was the manager of the Keystone team. He went up to Lincoln Borglum one day and heard that Lincoln was getting ready to hire several new men. Red asked Lincoln to hire baseball players. This is perhaps one of the first recruited teams in South Dakota baseball history.

Spring in the Black Hills! Enjoy the Avenue of Flags, Grand View Terrace, the Lincoln Borglum Museum, Carvers MarketPlace, the bookstores and the gift shop. Trails are currently not available.

Throwback Thursday brings us William S. Tallman (Bill), was born in Brooklyn, New York. Bill, was a lucky teenager, during his first, high school summer vacation, he had the chance to live and work with Sculptor Gutzon Borglum at his studio in Stamford, Connecticut. Later, in 1928 Bill again had the opportunity to spend more time with Gutzon, this time at the Borglum studio in San Antonio, Texas. While there, Bill helped Borglum with the design and making of “The North Carolina Memorial” which went on display at the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. The very next year Bill packed up and traveled to the Black Hills of South Dakota where he found employment working at Mount Rushmore with Borglum again. His very first job was a “Pointer” $1.11/hr. In 1930, after one year of work at Mount Rushmore, Bill was appointed superintendent. He was now in charge of all work at the memorial, a position he held until December of 1935. Borglum said, “He (Tallman) brings to this position as superintendent of the work an even temper, gift of patience and sanity in judgment and an appreciation of men.” In 1941 Bill went to work at a technical ceramics company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he was with them for the next thirty-five years until he retired at 65. After he left the Black Hills his artwork especially sculpture was very limited. In 1984, however he made two bronzes “Black Hills Bronc” and “Vaquero de Palenque”

The latest conservation effort was laser scanning. In 2009 a non-profit company named CyArk approached the National Park Service with a proposal to lead the Park Service staff through the sculptural scanning process. CyArk had many collaborators checkout their web site http://www.cyark.org/projects/mount-rushmore-national-memorial for the list and the 3D renderings of the scan. This scan is a sub-centimeter accurate, 3D capture of the sculpture.

Conservation of the sculpture took the shape of power washing in 2005. This was the first and only time the sculpture had ever been power washed, and the first major sculpture project that the new National Park Service Rope Access Team helped accomplish. The Karcher (powerwasher) company from Germany donated all of the equipment and over half of the labor. Look just past the workers ropes on Lincoln's nose and you can see the protective monitoring box from Wednesday's post.

After mapping the rock blocks within the sculpture, Analysis of those blocks is next. Each of the blocks was closely examined for potential movement. It was determined that 3 of the 22 blocks would potentially move out of the sculpture if they did decide to move. The National Park Service and the contractor Respec Engineering began monitoring these 3 blocks in 1998. Today we use strain gauges mounted across the cracks that make up that rock block. Each rock block has 3 monitors, each monitoring is oriented to watch a different cardinal direction.

The first structural analysis of the sculpture was performed in the late 1990s. A technique called photogrammetry was used to get a 3D view of the sculpture. The sculpture was then closely examined by geotechnical engineers. They mapped the inconsistencies on the 3D digital model. Through this process, it was determined that there are 144 inconsistencies in the sculpture. Some of these are cracks. Mapping these cracks revealed 22 individual rock blocks within the sculpture. Tomorrow we will talk about rock block monitoring.

The Sculptor, Gutzon Borglum was the first conservationist on Mount Rushmore. His analysis, adjustments and some rock failure during the carving, lead to the way the sculpture looks today. One of the largest challenges was the first Jefferson location. This first concept of the sculpture only had 3 presidents. Washington has always been planned for where he is today, but this concept had Jefferson on Washington's right and Lincoln on Washington's left. This post is the first of what will probably be 5 about sculpture conservation.

Within engineering, continued improvement is part of the process. We don't do any "improving" on the sculptor's design. What has significantly improved are the ways we attempt to conserve the sculpture. The attached letter is from one of the first "conservationist" on the sculpture. In this letter he traces the history of conservation back to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Beginning next week, we will post the history of sculpture conservation. You should read this, the history of conservation detailed here is true. The personal anecdotes are pretty funny, but I cannot speak to there validity.

The refining tool was the pointing system. With it, measurements were taking on the scale model and tranfered to the sculpture. The scale was 1 to 12. See a studio talk where a park ranger explains the carving process at the Mount Rushmore Youtube channel at MountRushmoreNPS.

Within the engineering process, creation according to design is one of the steps. To create the sculpture the workers/engineers needed to solve the access problem. Access was accomplished with a cable tram, scaffolding, ladders, and bosun chairs, and the creative tool......why dynamite of course!

Planning often is the next step in engineering. For a sculptor the scale model is a large part of the planning stage. Here is what the Sculptor had to say about modeling. "When a man has finished a perfect model, he has expressed himself and is through. Finished models should not be made, in them all the creative impulse has expressed itself; the enlargement is inevitably a stillborn, dead, souless thing" Gutzon Borglum