Commems Collection Classic: "Did You Know?" Mount Rushmore National Memorial #25

In 1991, the US Mint issued a clad half-dollar, silver dollar and gold half-eagle to mark the 50th anniversary of the "completion" of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Many do not realize, however, that the Memorial was not completed as originally intended by Gutzon Borglum, and that construction on the Memorial was stopped in October 1941 due to funding issues (precipitated, in part, by the then looming possibility that the US might soon be drawn into World War II).

What was left undone? For starters, the carving for each president featured on the Memorial -- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln -- was supposed to be a head-to-waist sculpture vs. the head-only version we all know today. There was also to be a Hall of Records carved into the mountain behind the presidents that Borglum envisioned being used to house important historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution; the Hall's entrance was to be reached via an 800-step granite staircase.

After WWII, there were renewed discussions regarding completing the Memorial as originally intended. Francis Higbee Case of South Dakota, first as a US Representative and then as a US Senator, introduced bills into Congress that would have authorized a commemorative 50-cent coin to help fund the new work on the Memorial enabling it to be completed as per Borglum's original vision. The bills called for the Director of the Mint to have up to two million coins to be struck (without specification of which mint or mints), and that the coins could be requested by the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society for up to ten years from the date the bill was enacted. The bills also stipulated that the work would be carried out by Lincoln Borglum (Gutzon's son); Lincoln completed the Memorial in 1941 after his father's unexpected death in March 1941.

Representative/Senator Case's bills never garnered the necessary support of his colleagues -- though he continued to introduce bills into the mid-1950s -- and so the classic US commemorative series was never to include a Mount Rushmore half-dollar.