History
Ku Klux Klan activities at Stone Mountain are deep-rooted, although the original conception of the memorial pre-dates the 1915 revival of the Klan. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan was emboldened by the release of D. W. Griffith’s Klan-glorifying film The Birth of a Nation, and by the lynching of Leo Frank, who was convicted in the murder of Mary Phagan. On November 25, 1915, a group of robed and hooded men met at Stone Mountain to create a new incarnation of the Klan. They were led by William J. Simmons, and they included a group calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan. A cross was burned, and the oath was administered by Nathan Bedford Forrest II, the grandson of the original Imperial Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, and was witnessed by the owner of Stone Mountain, Samuel Venable.
Fundraising for the monument resumed in 1923, and in October of that year, Venable granted the Klan easement with perpetual right to hold celebrations as they desired. Because of their deep involvement with the early fund-raising and their increasing political clout in Georgia, the Klan, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, were able to influence the ideology of the carving, and they strongly supported an explicitly Confederate memorial. Gutzon Borglum was commissioned to do the carving, and he with the Stone Mountain project. Of the $250,000 raised, part came directly from the Ku Klux Klan but part came from the federal government, which in 1924 issued special fifty-cent coins with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on them.
The other side reads “memorial to the valor of the soldier of the South.”
Borglum abandoned the project in 1923. American sculptor Augustus Lukeman continued until 1928, when further work stopped for thirty years.
In 1958, at the urging of Governor Marvin Griffin, the Georgia legislature approved a measure to purchase Stone Mountain for $1,125,000. In 1963, Walker Hancock was selected to complete the carving, and work began in 1964. The carving was completed by Roy Faulkner, who later operated a museum (now closed) on nearby Memorial Drive commemorating the carving’s history. The carving was considered complete on March 3, 1972.
Plane crashes
On September 16, 2003, a small airplane crashed around dusk into the back of the mountain, a remote cliff area which is not normally accessible.[5] The pilot, the airplane’s only occupant, was confirmed dead, and although the official accident report notes no probable cause, a witness “stated that the accident pilot threatened on multiple occasions when she knew him to commit suicide by flying into Stone Mountain.” Firefighters had to take the Skylift up and then rappel more than halfway down to the site of the plane’s wreckage.
According to George Weiblen’s annotated calendar for Monday, May 7, 1928: “Mail plane crashed on mountain at 8:00 P.M.”