Stephen Potter, a retired regional archaeologist for the service’s national capital region, cataloged some of the graffiti in the 1980s, noting “some that were extremely well executed.”

Long hidden graffiti scrawled on a pillar deep beneath the Lincoln Memorial may be a besotted worker’s drawing of a sexy screen siren from the silent age of film. Workers discovered the graffiti during a $69 million renovation project of the iconic memorial in Washington, D.C.

Forty-five feet below the Lincoln Memorial is art of a very different kind. On the pillars in the memorial's basement, where a visitor center is now under construction, is graffiti left behind by the workers who built the memorial to Abraham Lincoln more than a century ago.