Happenin’
Places › Georgia › Metro Atlanta › Stone Mountain Carving
Stone Mountain Carving

Photo: Marissa1776 / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

Stone Mountain Carving

Stone Mountain, GA · Metro Atlanta

About

Cut 42 feet deep into the north face of a granite dome, this is the largest high-relief carving in the world, spanning 190 feet of stone with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on horseback. Begun in 1923 and not finished until sculptor Roy Faulkner topped it off in 1972, the three-acre relief reads as a monument to the Lost Cause and the Klan revival that bankrolled its early years. You can take the cable car to the 1,683-foot summit for the long view, or stand in the lawn below as the nightly laser show plays across the figures.

Highlights

Getting there

1000 Robert E. Lee Blvd, Stone Mountain, GA 30083

Related places

Fox Theatre Attractions

Fox Theatre

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

This 1929 movie palace on Peachtree Street began as a Shrine temple, which is why its auditorium unfolds like an open-air Arabian courtyard beneath a ceiling of 96 crystal stars and clouds that drift across a painted night sky. Mighty Mo, the original Moller pipe organ with more than 3,600 pipes, still rises from the pit before Broadway tours and concerts. Take the backstage tour to see the Egyptian Ballroom and the Moorish detail up close, then catch a show under those flickering stars.

National Center for Civil and Human Rights Attractions

National Center for Civil and Human Rights

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Phil Freelon designed this downtown museum so its curved walls fold toward each other like clasped hands, and the experience inside earns that gesture. You can sit at a 1960s lunch-counter simulation with headphones that pipe in the jeers and threats sit-in protesters endured, then walk through galleries holding Martin Luther King Jr.'s handwritten sermons and travel documents. The upper floor widens the lens from the American civil rights movement to human rights struggles still unfolding around the world.

World of Coca-Cola Attractions

World of Coca-Cola

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Atlanta's downtown shrine to the world's most famous soft drink walks you from the 1880s soda fountain through the glass-walled vault said to hold the secret formula. The finale is the Taste It room, where you can sample more than 60 Coca-Cola products bottled across the globe, including a few that will make you wince. It sits on Pemberton Place beside Centennial Olympic Park, an easy pairing with the Georgia Aquarium next door.

Part of these collections

Curated guides that feature Stone Mountain Carving.

Georgia Attractions45 places

Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.