Monument of The States

Monument of The States. . The brainchild of Dr. Charles Bressler-Pettis, the Monument of States was dedicated on March 28, 1943. Dr. Pettis was President of the Kissimmee All-States Tourist Club (KAST); he felt it was a fitting tribute to the winter visitors who came to the community from each of the then 48 states. Work began in the fall of 1941 with local businesses and residents donating more than 500 bags of cement for the project. The City of Kissimmee provided the site; the KAST Club members were the volunteer labor and rocks were brought in from all over the country and abroad., In the form of an irregular quadrilateral step-pyramid of 21 varying tiers, the bottom tier is 16 feet; the top one 2 1/2 feet square. Total weight of the monument is 600,000 lbs. When completed it consisted of 1,500 stones from the 48 states and 21 countries with Pettis adding stones collected from his travels. President Franklin D. Roosevelt contributed a stone from his Hyde Park estate on the Hudson. The monument has a base 22 feet square and is 50 feet tall. A solid concrete American bald eagle weighing 562 lbs. with a 6 foot wing span sits atop a 3 foot concrete sphere which was poured where it rests. When Dr. Pettis died in May of 1954, the City Commissioners passed an ordinance allowing his remains to be buried in the monument. Although the gesture was greatly appreciated by Mrs. Pettis, she chose to have them interred in his home town of Grant, Missouri. The Monument of States was entered into the National Historic Register on October 23, 2015.