\u201cThey sent me a picture and it was ridiculous,\u201d Bott said. \u201cTheir only instructions were that they wanted to put it at a place where people eat a lot of hamburgers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The giant bronze hamburger now sits in Rapid City, South Dakota, on the way to Mount Rushmore, and is popular with tourists. It is 8 feet wide, 5 feet tall and sits on about 1,800 pounds of granite.<\/p>\n
McDonald\u2019s discovered Bott because he had just\u00a0created a monument for the Philadelphia Eagles after they won the 2018 Super Bowl. The Eagles were using the same public-relations firm. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe drove out to Philly and put up this real nice monument outside the stadium that was a statue of the coach and the quarterback,\u201d\u00a0Bott recalled. “We did it the day before they opened their 2019 season.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Locally, another non-gravestone project was a stylized bench for the Riverton Junior Football League.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA bench can be boring, but a bench shaped like a football standing on top of stainless steel letters is not boring,\u201d Bott said. \u201cWe designed it so that the kids could sign their names on all the stainless letters when they win the Riverton Junior Football League championship, and then you can wipe them off with acetone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott\u2019s latest project was a veterans’ memorial in Glenrock that features a stainless-steel statue of detailed boots, gun and helmet that took his artist\u00a0more than 600 hours to construct.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe create the majority, if not almost all, of the veterans’ memorial projects in Wyoming,\u201d Bott said. \u201cThat’s been always a pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott also makes sure all his monuments are made with materials completely sourced from the U.S. He said most veterans monuments now are black and come from China or India.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe granite for the Glenrock memorial came entirely came out of South Dakota,\u201d Bott said. \u201cThe stainless steel came out of Illinois, the bronze came out of Utah.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Drew](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Drew-Bott-8.Whitman-4-10.10.26.jpg\")
Drew Bott listens to people so that their memorial art will be unique to them. This memorial features dogs that are nearly life size and the stone is about eight feet long.\u00a0 (Courtesy Photo)Memorial Art<\/p>\n
As a memorial artist, Bott said he hates generic gravestones.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve turned, unfortunately, memorials and cemeteries into post office boxes, and I can’t stand that,\u201d Bott said. \u201cAll of us wear different clothes, different glasses, different everything, and I’ve never understood why we ended up treating this part of our lives as an item you would pick out of a catalog.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Bott said he is on a mission, one family and one grave space at a time, to give people something different in a cemetery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think art has a way of bringing about some good in the world, and what better place to put it than where everybody is hurting,\u201d he said. \u201cMy job is to create things that somebody can’t think of and get it to the point where somebody will smile over it. And if it’s fun, that\u2019s even better.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy job is to create a piece of art that represents what somebody was and celebrates them. We are acknowledging that the loved one passed away.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said his memorial business exists for those looking for a unique art piece to remember loved one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
His latest piece is a 16-inch globe that features every continent and is perfectly tilted on the axis to rotate. As you walk by, Bott said, it can be spun. The monument is curved like a wave.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is for a family that never had any kids and worked in Dubai their whole life,\u201d Bott said. \u201cThey wanted something to show that they were world travelers.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"More](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Drew-Bott-6-7-10.10.26.jpg\")
More examples of Drew Bott’s memorial art. (Courtesy Photo)Fifth Generation\u00a0<\/p>\n
The family tradition of working in stone started 151 years ago, when Bott\u2019s great-great grandfather apprenticed on the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don’t really know what portions of it he worked on,\u201d Bott said. \u201cWe know he was somebody who used the hammer and chisel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott\u2019s family ended up in Ogden, Utah, in 1875 and has been on the same corner there since 1893. He is the fifth generation to work in stone \u2013 although that was never his plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bott trained to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency and only agreed to work in the family business for managerial experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Twenty-one years later, he is still working in stone. He is as adamant as ever that he hates working on headstones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout 12 years ago is when we steered it in this much more fun and unique direction,\u201d Bott said. \u201cWe have just turned our monument business into an art studio and that has been what I have loved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott travels all over the United States delivering his monuments and says he now only does about 65 grave art pieces a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople call us primarily because they want it to make the cover of a magazine, and they need it to be something that stands out because their person stood out,\u201d Bott said. \u201cThey are all personalized that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Drew](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Drew-Bott-1.-Glenrock-memorial-10.10.26.jpeg\")
Drew Bott of Bott Monument in Riverton said that his latest project is his best yet – a memorial at Glenrock Veterans Park in Glenrock, Wyoming. He only uses stone from America and so it was made of Sunset Mahogany granite from Dakota Granite. (Dakota Granite)Helping Families Heal<\/p>\n
Bott said that many years ago he told a grieving mother that his goal was that she would want to go to the cemetery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember she said at the time, I thought, this guy’s crazy,\u201d Bott said. \u201cShe came back later and said, ‘You know, I actually do.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott said the woman was never able to touch her son because he spent his entire brief life in the incubator. Instead, she sat outside his little incubator for the few days he was alive and would play a small snow globe that played Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”<\/p>\n
\u201cShe would sit and twist it and wind it and play it and twist it and wind it and play it,\u201d Bott said. \u201cSo at the graveside, we made a stainless steel music box that plays Pachelbel’s Canon in D, so anybody can come and wind it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bott then gave her an additional 20 units so that she could replace the music whenever it wore out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cShe should have 50 years of Pachelbel’s Canon to be playing out there,\u201d Bott said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bott said he gets his inspiration for these unique works by visiting with the grieving families.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like just asking really weird questions to get them to think outside of a box,\u201d Bott said. \u201cAnd if it can be funny, let’s make it funny.\u201d<\/p>\n
He just completed a memorial for a young man who died in a motorcycle accident that features a real motorcycle wheel. Bott mounted it in a cutout so people can spin the wheel. It has a real gold chain and gold sprockets the family wanted to represent their lost loved one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf every cemetery were an art gallery, I really think we would think about that experience much differently than we do,\u201d Bott said. \u201cA cemetery literally means a remembering place.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Bott prepares for his next project, he’s determined that it is just as fun and meaningful as designing the world\u2019s largest Quarter Pounder or a Super Bowl statue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Contact Jackie Dorothy at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com<\/p>\n
![\"Drew](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Drew-Bott-3.-Worlds-largest-quarter-pounder-10.10.26.jpeg\")
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