October 31 · This Day in America
For fourteen years, dynamite and jackhammers have been carving the granite face of a South Dakota mountain into something no civilization had attempted at this scale: the heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, each as tall as a five-story building. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, dreamed it as a "Shrine of Democracy" and drove the work obsessively until his death this spring. His son Lincoln finishes the final detailing. Then, with funds exhausted and a world war closing in, the drills go quiet on this day and never start again. The figures were meant to descend to the waist; they end at the chin. And yet there they are — four faces watching the prairie, weathering at a rate of one inch every ten thousand years, a bet that the idea behind them lasts at least that long.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1864
Lincoln needs the votes. With the war still raging and a hard election days away, Nevada races its entire 16,543-word constitution to Washington by telegraph — the longest message ever wired at the time — and is admitted as the 36th state on the last day of October. No battle was ever fought on its soil, yet "Battle Born" goes on the state flag, where it remains: a state delivered, just in time, by the Union it was meant to save.
Source: www.history.com