Stone Mountain, a massive quartz monzonite monadnock east of Atlanta, is one of Georgia’s most prominent natural landmarks, known for its broad summit views, unusual rain-fed pools, rare plants and animals, and wooded lower slopes. Formed hundreds of millions of years ago as an igneous intrusion later exposed by erosion, it is also the setting of an immense high-relief carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. That carving, pursued over decades and completed after Georgia bought the site in 1958, is inseparable from the mountain’s ties to the Confederacy, the reborn Ku Klux Klan in 1915, and segregation-era politics, making it both a major recreation area and a lasting historical controversy.