LA FERIA, Texas -- Lincoln Borglum, who spent 10 years helping his father etch presidential portraits into Mount Rushmore, died after a long illness. He was 73.
Lincoln Borglum joined his father, Gutzon Borglum, to chisel and blast the faces of four presidents into a mountainside.
The younger Borglum also wrote a book titled 'Mount Rushmore: The Unfinished Dream' and lectured to raise money to install a record room behind the faces at Mount Rushmore to explain the world's largest sculpture.
He died Monday at a Corpus Christi hospital after a long illness. Services are scheduled Thursday in San Antonio.
Although a hall of records was included in the original plans for Mount Rushmore, Borglum spoke often of the project in recent weeks, said Robert Scoggins, a friend in neighboring Harlingen.
'That is one sad thing in his life that he never got accomplished,' said Scoggins, who oversees the Mount Rushmore Archives Foundation.
Borglum once told UPI, 'The idea is to give an explanation of the heads on Mount Rushmore so that people a million years from now will realize their significance. So many things are lost in history. The Sphinx, the pyramids, the heads on Easter Island. Archeologist are forever trying to figure them out.
'A history of the mounument -- who did it and why, and a history of the United States -- would be carved into the walls of the room.'
Lincoln Borglum completed the huge sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt on the 6,200-foot tall mountain in South Dakota after his father died in 1941.
The younger Borglum moved to South Texas 15 years ago. Lincoln Borglum had spent part of his youth in San Antonio, where his father devised the original model of Mount Rushmore in a tiny studio.
Survivors include four sons, one daughter and several grandchildren.
