Walk Of Fame

The Walk of Fame was a brainchild of former Rollins President Hamilton Holt (’49H). Created in 1929 from a starting nucleus of twenty stones, the current Walk of Fame consists of 530 stones. Holt, along with his assistant A. J. Hanna (’17 ’45H), had obtained a significant portion of these stones during their trips to New England and Europe.

Renovated in 1989, the Walk of Fame is a semi-circular pathway in the center of the Rollins campus, surrounding the Barker Flagpole and Mills lawn. On the sides of the walk, stones from various places around the world sit under the shade of the oak trees. Each stone contains the engraved names of famous men and women in various fields ranging from writers, inventors, and philosophers, to scientists, artists, and other important figures. Among the most noteworthy names in the Walk of Fame are stones from the homes of Aristotle (taken from the neighborhood of the Lyceum in Athens), Oscar Wilde, Paul Murphy, Maya Angelou, Edward Albee, Fred Rogers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Disraeli, William Penn, Edmund Burke, Thomas Reed, and even Confucius.  The largest and most noticeable stone in the walk, which has a circular shape with an opening in the middle, is an upright millstone that heads the Walk of Fame by the western entrance. Reputedly, it is nearly three hundred years old, and its inscription, “Sermons in stone and good in everything,” is a quotation from Shakespeare.