What is stone mountain

Learn More. The Skyride and Natural areas are open. We continue to Play Safe together. For details about who is currently required to wear a mask and our thorough cleanliness protocols, Click Here. Discover everything Stone Mountain has to offer, including family-friendly attractions, seasonal events and festivals, natural recreation areas and more.

The safety and well-being of our guests and employees remains our top priority. For our current policies, please visit our Play Safe Page. Mabel Sharp has been the carillonneur for over thirty years. The Summit Skyride was used to carry the Olympic Torch to the summit in The Lasershow is the longest-running laser show in the world at over thirty years.

Its image is five times larger than an IMAX screen. The Stone Mountain Inn was built with no rooms having windows facing the mountain. It had bidets in many rooms, a rarity in the USA even now.

Angel Wallenda walked a tightrope above the Memorial Lawn in front of the carving in Two Suicide Derbys featured a race down the steep side of the mountain and over the unfinished carving at the participant's own risk in The Robert E.

Lee Riverboat was sunk in Stone Mountain Lake. At 85, Plane fought as passionately for the memory of her husband and other Confederate soldiers killed in the Civil War as she had done decades earlier. He proposed what would be a 1,foot-long carving featuring to 1, figures, with Lee, Jackson and Davis in the foreground and hundreds of soldiers behind them. Plane also secured a land deed from the Venable family, with patriarch Sam Venable even inviting Borglum to his home at the foot of the mountain.

That night, more than a dozen men gathered to become part of a resurgent white supremacy group that had mostly died out in the late s.

Inspired by the film Birth of a Nation , they burned a cross and swore their loyalty to the Klan, ushering in a new era of white nationalist terrorism. Venable himself, who was part of the ceremony, quickly rose through the ranks of the KKK, allowing the group regular use of his grounds. At one point, Borglum considered including the KKK in his monument at the prompting of Plane, who wrote :.

Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South, I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance? Although Borglum ultimately declined to include the figures in his carving, he agreed the KKK should have some recognition in the memorial, perhaps in a room carved out of the mountain.

But none of his plans were destined to be achieved. Wherever the group popped up , acts of terror committed against innocent African-Americans, Catholics and immigrants were sure to follow.

With only three years to go before the land deed from the Venables was set to expire they had granted 12 years to finish the memorial , a second sculptor was brought in. But Augustus Lukeman barely had time to remove the work Borglum had done and start work on a carving of three figures on horseback when he was forced to abandon the project in The deed expired, the Venable family took back their property, and the mountain remained untouched for 36 years.

But with the Brown v. Board of Education decision that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the growing influence of the Civil Rights Movement, the time had come for renewed action.