Wes Freeman’s career has been marked by great variety. The Vietnam veteran did a 10-year stint with the DeKalb County, Ga., Sheriff’s Department, working in the county jail and serving on the SWAT team. He drove an 18-wheeler. He sold insurance. Since 2005 he and his wife Barbara have owned a trapping company, helping homeowners in the Atlanta area get rid of squirrels, rats, and raccoons, and sometimes even bears, deer, and coyotes. Wes is a friendly and talkative man, and listening to him tell stories about catching wild animals and controlling inmates is a pleasant and entertaining way to spend an hour or two.
Why, you ask, is Wes the subject of a column in Civil War News? Well, it is not just unruly bears or prisoners he has dealt with; the reason is his first job after his return from Vietnam. Wes is the last man alive who worked on the Stone Mountain carving.
In late 1970 or early 1971, his friend Nelson Wilborn suggested he might work with him at Stone Mountain Park. Wes expected to get employment on the maintenance crew or something like that. Instead he found himself high above ground, on a platform pinned to the mountainside, talking to chief carver
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Roy Faulkner, the man in charge of turning the rock face into a Brobdingnagian sculpture.
Faulkner was a rather eccentric man and he gave Wes a rather eccentric interview. When Wes proved that he did not fear heights but was prudent enough not to take chances, Faulkner said “you’re hired” and put him right to work.
For the next two years or so Wes’s workplace was a platform in the sky, built on steel beams fixed to the granite. A scaffold hanging below that was raised and lowered by two winches. Here Faulkner and his crew cut the rock away to reveal the men and horses inside.
The carving, begun by Gutzon Borglum in 1923 and taken over by Augustus Lukeman in 1925, was abandoned in 1928. After a long hiatus, work resumed in 1964 under the aegis of the state of Georgia. While Wes was on the job almost all the work was done by Faulkner, Nelson Wilborn, and Wes. The previous carvers used dynamite, but under the supervision of sculptor Walker Hancock, gentler methods were employed to create the huge images of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. In some places the men used pneumatic tools similar to jack-hammers.
In others they drilled holes into the stone and broke it up by driving wedges, or “splits,” into the holes. Shaping was done with a “thermo-torch.”
The thermo-torch was a device designed by Faulkner. It was a portable version of a much larger tool used to split rock in the quarry, Wes said. It was fueled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene, the thermo-torch spit out fire at 7,000 degrees. “Stone Mountain is ‘live rock;’ it contains water,” Wes explained. “The thermo-torch at 7,000 degrees would heat the water so much that the granite would just flake off.”
Wes says that Hancock seldom appeared on the worksite and when he was present he stayed on the ground. According to Wes, Hancock was afraid of heights. “He did not want to go up on the mountain. I think he tried it once and decided he couldn’t make it.” While the crew labored above, a model on the ground, built on a one-inch to three-foot scale, served as a guide.
Some original work had to be repaired with stone patches The granite stone face marked and ready to cut. This was a complicated task performed on platforms high above the ground with no safety nets or lines.
affixed to the carving. The largest patch was a large piece of granite; Wes estimates the size to be about 10 feet by 12 feet with a depth of six feet, that formed Lee’s elbow. Wes has no idea how much it weighed, but he said that when the rock was rigged to a pulley, lifting it required the tractive power of two concrete mixers pulling away from the mountain.
This was, obviously, very dangerous work. There were no nets or safety lines to catch the workers if they fell.
Falling was not the only hazard. Once the thermo-torch did not shut off properly and the flame began to back up the line toward the fuel supply. “Nelson, Roy, and myself all pulled out our knives and ran; we started cutting lines. Luckily we got it before it got to the main line. If it had it would have blowed everything off that mountain.” Everything but the carving, he clarified; just the scaffolding and three souls.
Wes speaks matter-of-factly about another brush with death. While he was helping surround the unfinished carving with a gigantic Christmas wreath made of 21 spruce trees, a shifting wind struck one of the branches which then hit Wes. “It jerked me around and I fell upside down.” He was saved by his strong jeans, a pin protruding from the scaffold, and his quick-thinking coworkers. “One of the pins caught my pants leg on the seam. It ripped about six inches and stopped to hold me upside down. They threw me a rope and I had to kick loose and swing around underneath the carving.” He hung on as they pulled him up with the winch.
Later, Wes’s friend Nelson was not as fortunate. When Nelson fell there was no pin to catch his pants and no rope to haul him up. Nelson fell to his death.
Wes’s friend was at least the second man to die on the project. Wes remembers one more, Boll Weevil Williams. There may have been others but Wes is not sure. In any event Nelson was the last casualty. “The day Nelson fell, Roy called it done,” Wes recalled. “Roy was not going to let this mountain kill anybody else.”
The head carver halted work and declared the carving complete. In a way it was already finished, but in another way it was not and never will be. Additional sculpting in lower relief was planned to form a backdrop for the three mounted figures, and the horses were to be finished down to their feet.
I asked Wes if state officials or others wanted to continue. “As far as what happened in the background, I don’t know.” Wes said. “But Roy said ‘that was that’ and that was that.”
The official dedication had already been held, in May 1970. According to Stone Mountain Park’s Official Commemorative Guide, “finishing touches were made in 1972—including the addition of a memorial with bronze statues at the carving’s base.”
These finishing touches were at ground level. As for the aerial work, Roy Faulkner had said “that was that” and that was that.
Stone Mountain carving as work resumed in mid-1960s. A careful examination shows that Lee’s elbow had not yet been repaired.
