Samuel Hoyt Venable
Samuel Hoyt Venable owned of the property on which Stone Mountain stands when the United Daughters of the Confederacy conceived of the memorial.
When approached by the group in 1916, he deeded the face of the mountain and ten adjoining
acres for the purpose of carving a confederate monument. He allowed twelve years for the
completion of a monument, without which the land would revert back to himself.
After twelve years under Gutzon Borglum and Augustus Lukeman, the carving was still far from completion and,
acting under their original agreement with the UDC, the Venable family reclaimed the land and
the mountain. The carving would lay dormant until the State of
Georgia began work on the Confederate memorial anew in the 1960's.
Venable was very active in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan,
which officially took place at the mountain on November 25, 1915. In 1923, Venable granted
permission to the Ku Klux Klan to use the property and the mountain for celebrations. Gutzon
Borglum, the original carver of the Confederate Memorial, was a fellow member of the Klan.
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