On October 4, 1927, sculptor Gutzon Borglum began carving the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This studio photograph by Rise Studio, taken around 1936, shows Borglum’s large plaster model of the finished design, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln towering over a man on a ladder. Models like this guided the crews who spent fourteen years turning the mountain into a monument, which fits today’s word of the day, epoch, since the project marked a new era in American monumental sculpture. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collection via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.