The Pomona Fountain (Plaza)

A figure of Pomona — the Roman goddess of orchards, fruit, and vineyards — set in a Country Club Plaza courtyard. Imported from Italy and installed in 1969, it is one of the later additions under the Nichols Company’s European-acquisition program, continuing the Italian-import tradition into the late 1960s.

History

The Pomona figure was imported from Italy and installed on the Country Club Plaza in 1969, near the end of the Nichols Company’s decades-long program of populating the Plaza with European statuary and fountains.¹ By that date the Plaza’s flagship pieces — the Mill Creek (J.C. Nichols Memorial), Neptune, and Seville Light fountains — were already in place; Pomona belongs to the program’s final phase rather than its 1920s origins.¹

Pomona, as the Roman tutelary deity of cultivated fruit trees and orchards, fits the Plaza’s broader classical-mythological statuary vocabulary established under J.C. Nichols and continued by his son Miller Nichols.¹²

Architecture + materials

A figural sculpture of Pomona set within a Plaza fountain courtyard. Material (commonly bronze for the Plaza’s Italian imports) is unconfirmed — “.

Current status

Operating, with the Plaza’s seasonal winter off-period (most Plaza fountains are drained by mid-November after the Plaza Lighting Ceremony and refilled in late March or April).¹

Cultural significance

Pomona is part of the Plaza’s late-1960s acquisition wave and demonstrates that the Nichols Company’s European-import model — treating imported statuary as permanent civic art — persisted for roughly four decades after the Plaza’s 1922 opening.¹ It sits within the same Italian-mythological register as the Plaza’s Neptune, Mermaid, Boy and Frog, and Bacchus pieces.

Visiting

• Address: Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, MO 64112 (specific courtyard “)
• Best time to visit: Spring through fall (seasonal operation)
• Public access: Free

Sources

Footnotes

1. KS.City Wiki — Country Club Plaza Fountains (collection page), which records Pomona as a 1969 Italian import “one of the later additions under the Nichols Company’s acquisition program,” and documents the Plaza’s seasonal operation. That page draws on the standard references below. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Sherry Piland & Ellen J. Uguccioni — Fountains of Kansas City: A History and Love Affair (City of Fountains Foundation, 1985). Standard print reference for Plaza fountain provenance; cited for the Nichols-era mythological statuary program. Corroborating institutional documentation: City of Fountains Foundation, https://cityoffountains.org. ↩