People mindblown after seeing original Mount Rushmore design that couldn't be completed due to lack of funds

Between 1927 and 1941, four hundred workers set out with their jackhammers, chisels, and dynamite, and arrived at a towering mountain in South Dakota’s Black Hills. There, they blasted 410,000 tonnes of rock from the mountaintop to sculpt a monument that would capture the history of America. Known as Mount Rushmore today, each year, the prestigious national memorial welcomes more than two million visitors, who readily enjoy the vista of four colossal stern faces gazing into sunlight. The entire sight could have been a lot more different and magnanimous, if, at the time of its construction, the designers hadn’t run out of funding, per BBC.

Standing 5,725 feet above sea level, the looming monument features chalk-white granite sculptures of four great American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. But its history wasn’t devoid of dramatic episodes. The original idea for the memorial was proposed in 1923 by South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson. Robinson’s idea was to include giant artwork of Wild West heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody. With this idea, Robinson approached Gutzon Borglum, a Freemason and a Ku Klux Klan member.

According to the original idea, the sculptures were to be carved not just at the presidents' busts, but to the waists. Besides, Borglum and Robinson also wanted to include sculptures of Crazy Horse and Susan B Anthony, the social reformer and votes for women campaigner, in the monument. Their initial cheque from the government was about $54,670.56, according to the National Park Service. But soon after the construction of the four president faces was complete, Congress withdrew the finances. Plus, noticing that the government was exerting too much control over the project, Robinson walked away from the project altogether.

At the time when the US Congress rejected their bill, Borglum and his assistants were working on a secret compartment called the “Hall of Records” that was to be constructed behind Lincoln’s head. The plan was to create a secret repository of all the important official US documents. Words on the capstone of this repository written by Borglum, read, “Let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.”

Borglum spent the next two years between 1939 and 1941 traveling extensively to secure more funds for the project. However, in March 1941, he passed away. Then, as American forces got involved in World War II, the project of Mount Rushmore National Memorial was declared closed on October 31, 1941. Despite the monument being one of the most majestic sites in America, it hasn’t prevented people on social media from cooking up theories about what could have happened if the designers had received all the funding they needed. "I like it a lot better with just the faces," commented a Reddit user.