Each year, about 2 million people flock to see the four famous faces carved into Mount Rushmore. But few visitors may be aware that a mysterious rectangular opening hides behind President Abraham Lincoln’s image.
Blasted into the mountainside, that passageway is closed to the public; it’s a vestige of a planned feature that was never completed.
Inside, a titanium vault holds 16 porcelain-enamel panels inscribed with information about the monument. It was “left as a record for people thousands of years from now who may wonder how and why Mount Rushmore was carved,” a National Park Service webpage says.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which has stood for almost 85 years so far, was fraught with so many setbacks that South Dakota State Historian Ben Jones marvels over “the fact that it exists at all.”…