Museum Collections

In 1908 Gutzon Borglum's mammoth six-ton marble head of Lincoln was accepted by a joint committee of Congress and may be seen today in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol; it was that monumental head that led Borglum to the idea of carving colossal images of southern heroes on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia, and ultimately to the Mount Rushmore group in South Dakota, in which the face of Lincoln joins those of Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. The Society's bronze statuette may have been made as a competition model for the statue of Lincoln for Cincinnati's Lytle Park; the commission was ultimately awarded to George Grey Barnard.