The Lincoln Memorial has been one of America’s most iconic landmarks since

opening in 1922. The neoclassical monument honoring Abraham Lincoln is

the most visited tourist site in Washington, D.C. It appears on the back of
pennies and five-dollar bills. It has been both a backdrop in memorable movie
scenes and center stage for seminal moments in American history such as the
1939 concert by opera singer Marian Anderson and the 1963 “I Have a
Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here are 10 facts you may not know about the Lincoln Memorial:

1. The memorial opened nearly 60 years after Lincoln’s

assassination.

Although calls to erect a national monument in Lincoln’s honor started almost

immediately after his assassination, the project dragged on for decades. After
the U.S. Congress in 1867 authorized construction of a monument on the U.S.
Capitol grounds, sculptor Clark Mills designed a memorial tiered like a
wedding cake that was cluttered with dozens of statues and topped by a
bronzed depiction of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Fundraising, however, sputtered during Reconstruction, and the project
fizzled. Not until 1911 did Congress approve $2 million to build a national
memorial. After three years of contentious debate over its location and design
and a lengthy construction process slowed by World War I, the Lincoln
Memorial opened in 1922.

2. Rejected designs included an Egyptian pyramid.

In selecting architect Henry Bacon’s design modeled after the Parthenon in

Athens, the Lincoln Memorial Commission bypassed several eccentric
designs proposed by architect John Russell Pope. In addition to his preferred
design for an open-air, neoclassical monument, Pope submitted sketches of
alternatives that included a stepped Mayan temple with a massive eternal
flame on its summit, a ziggurat topped by a statue of Lincoln and an Egyptian
pyramid with classical porticoes on each side. Although passed over for the
Lincoln Memorial commission, Pope later submitted the winning design for the
Jefferson Memorial.

READ MORE: Check out our Abraham Lincoln content hub, with more
than three dozen stories about the 16th president.

Laying the cornerstone for the Lincoln Memorial

Buyenlarge/Getty Images

3. A former Confederate officer broke ground on the Lincoln

Memorial.
At the monument’s groundbreaking on February 12, 1914, Lincoln Memorial
Commission member Joseph Blackburn “turned the first spadeful of sod,”
according to The New York Times. Prior to representing the martyred
president’s native state of Kentucky in the U.S. Congress for nearly 30 years,
Blackburn served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army during the
Civil War. “This memorial will show that Lincoln is now regarded as the
greatest of all Americans,” the former Confederate officer said at the simple
groundbreaking ceremony, “and that he is so held by the South as well as the
North.”

4. The memorial’s walls and columns tilt inward.

Although the memorial looks perfectly symmetrical, it’s an optical illusion. The
structure’s exterior walls, facades and columns were purposely built to lean
slightly inward, according to the National Park Service, “to compensate for
perspective distortions which would otherwise make the memorial appear
asymmetrical.”