re: Stone Mountain life span?

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Blow it up.

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We love our Taliban, don't we folks?

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Until the Ds take over the state house, state senate, and governor's mansion.

Then they repeal the monument protection law (which specifically protects the mountain and carving), and then pass a law directing the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to remove it.

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None of that matters

People ripping down statues everywhere with no repercussions.

I’m thinking of making a pilgrimage there 4th of July weekend before it gets defaced/destroyed hopefully.

I have a pretty substantial collection of civil war books and Troiani prints.

I'm going to have to start hiding them like a kid with stolen playboys.

Some State Rep was trying to do something about it a couple years back.

*Of course, it was Stacey Abrams:
Politician says Stone Mountain carvings should be removed

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It will be sandblasted off within 5 years.

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Sandblasted?

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the carving measures 90 feet tall, 190 feet wide and 11 feet deep. It spans 3 acres and is larger than Mount Rushmore.

Robert E. Lee is as tall as a nine-story building.

Jefferson Davis'thumb is the size of a sofa.

Sandblasting? No. Dynamite blasting, maybe.

They've already gotten half of it changed to their liking.

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People ripping down statues everywhere with no repercussions.

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As long as they are not standing where it lands.

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They blow up Stone Mountain and it might be time to get this second civil war started. Not sure there’s any turning back at that point


That place is awesome

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This is what you want to start a war over?

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names (the North Coast city of Fort Bragg, named after Braxton Bragg, a U.S. Army officer who served as a Confederate general, would not be forced to change its name).

The removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s statehouse this month, which lawmakers approved after weeks of heated deliberation, was just one step in a broader critical examination of the Confederate emblems and names still on display in other state capitols and cemeteries, and on license plates, roads and schools.

Sponsored

The Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is now demanding that Stone Mountain’s slate be wiped clean -- literally. Calling the image “a glorification of white supremacy,” the group wants it scraped from the mountain’s face.

It’s no secret that Confederate leaders during the Civil War explicitly defined their cause as a defense of slavery and white supremacy. A towering carving of the Confederacy’s most powerful political and military leaders would, therefore, seem a clear glorification of that cause. And the same could be said for other Confederate monuments across the country.

But many staunch defenders of the Confederate battle flag argue it’s an important symbol of Southern heritage and culture, and commemorates the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who valiantly fought and died for “the Lost Cause.”

Stone Mountain’s role in memorializing this cause, however, is a bit more nuanced. Embedded in this mountain are two stories, only one of which is captured in the bas-relief.

?An Atlanta Constitution clipping from Nov. 28, 1915 describing the Klan re-establishment atop Stone Mountain. (Wikimedia)

Lesser known is that Stone Mountain is the symbolic birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan. The original Klan, founded in 1865, had been largely stamped out by the mid-1870s after a period of aggressive federal intervention during Reconstruction. In 1915, William J. Simmons, a former Methodist preacher, launched a campaign to reestablish the group. Purportedly inspired by the film "The Birth of a Nation," a blatantly racist “historical romance” glorifying the original Klan, Simmons led a small group up Stone Mountain one November night in advance of the film’s Atlanta debut. At the summit, they set a cross ablaze.

The reestablished Klan's white supremacist ideology -- primarily targeting blacks, but also Jews, Catholics and foreigners -- struck a chord in the South, and the group rapidly expanded. By the mid-1920s, national membership was estimated in the millions, including sizable pockets in some northern states. Minority communities found themselves increasingly terrorized by vigilante gangs of hooded, white-robed men.

This historical footnote is, not surprisingly, omitted from the description on Stone Mountain's corporate website. But the two histories are inextricably linked.

At the time of the Klan’s resurgence, Stone Mountain was owned by aa quarry operator named Samuel Venable. A fan of "The Birth of a Nation," Venable accompanied Simmons on that November night and became an active member of the group, hosting regular Klan ceremonies on the mountain.

Venable later leased a portion of the land to a Georgia chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who set out to build a memorial to the Lost Cause. Gutzon Borglum, a Danish-American sculptor and Klan member designed the massive bas-release, proclaiming it would be the “the greatest monument ever built,” comparable to the Egyptian pyramids. Helen Plane, head of the local UDOC chapter, went to great lengths to persuade Borglum to include the Klan in the memorial. She wrote:

“I feel it is due to the Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”

There was strong support for the idea, and it would may have come to pass had the project not run out of funding. Borglum left in a huff, and the effort languished for decades, with only the carving of Lee’s head finished. (Borglum later established his reputation with another monumental project: Mount Rushmore.)

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Blow it up.

I think the gap in the horses mouth is like 6’ wide. Its an absolute huge carving.