The Giant Chest of Drawers

A chest of drawers 38 feet tall stands on North Hamilton Street in High Point, North Carolina, with two socks six feet long hanging out of a half open drawer. It is a building. The High Point Chamber of Commerce put up the original in 1926, at a cost of about 5,000 dollars in cash and donated materials, as its offices and its bureau of information, shaped as a period bureau with a painted mirror reading The Industrial City. High Point had been making furniture since 1889 and wanted a landmark that said so. It stood at first in Tate Park, and in 1951 the state Jaycees moved it to Hamilton Street, asking that it never be taken outside the city limits. The building was remade in 1996 by Sid Lenger, a designer, who wrapped the old bureau in a steel frame and synthetic stucco and restyled it as a Goddard and Townsend blockfront chest, the eighteenth century Newport form, for 40,000 dollars raised over three years and about 60,000 dollars in donated labour. The socks were his addition, a nod to the hosiery mills that were the city's other industry. A developer painted the whole thing battleship grey around 2016; a children's museum acquired it in 2018 and had the cherry finish restored by Brian Davis, an artist who had worked for Lenger and traced the original paint formula. Davis repainted the socks too, in the museum's pink and blue with High Point University purple and the stars of the local baseball club. The building holds about 2,382 square feet on two floors, has served as museum workspace and as a market week showroom, and was put up for sale in April 2026. Lenger also designed the 85 foot highboy at a furniture showroom five miles away in Jamestown.