To some the vertical rocks in front of Mahomet’s Yo Yo’s resemble art. To others, mostly children, they look like a climbing challenge.
But to owners Matt and Alice Pommier, the rocks remind them of a time when the Sangamon Elementary playground was filled with shouting and laughter.
It was the spring of 2017, and change was in the air.
Sangamon Elementary had been sold as Middletown Prairie was being renovated and added onto. Mark Cabutti, Sangamon’s Principal for more than two decades, was getting ready to retire. And one commercial lot on the corner of Lombard and Main Street, just to the east of the school, would soon have a yogurt shop.
As Matt Pommier added the sandstone rocks in front of Yo Yo’s he looked across the street to a playground filled with children so excited to play lunch football with their principal.
“Matt just kind of stopped for a minute and stood and watched the kids for a minute,” Alice Pommier said. “He’d see everybody run and Mark would stand up there and go, “touchdown.” They were having so much fun.
“Those rocks remind him of the kids running around Mark with his hands up, just playing football.”
Matt decided at that moment that the vertical rocks, all different heights, just like the children and adult across the street, would be called the “Cabutti Rocks.”
Even though the Sangamon playground is no longer filled with children in the afternoon, Alice said that the kids run around the rocks at Yo Yo’s.
“I think a lot of people look at them with interest as to what is that,” Alice said. “I guess you can make it whatever you want to make it, you can decide whatever they look like, but that’s kind of where Matt’s story.”
As owners of Mahomet Landscapes, it would be conceivable that the Pommiers could sculpt the rocks to be whatever they want, but Alice said sandstone from the Arkansas/Oklahoma area is extracted in block form.
“Those are absolutely completely natural,” she said. “They grow in the ground kind of like that, and they just take an excavator and they just peel them away and let them fall.”
After retirement, Cabutti visited Yo Yo’s to read to children. Alice hopes that he will continue to come around the coffee shop to visit.
“We were very fortunate to know him and to be friends with him,” she said.
