How much is a link to High Point’s furniture history worth? The Triad will soon find out.
508 N. Hamilton St., also known as the World’s Tallest Chest of Drawers, is under contract with a prospective new owner, according to Alex Field, broker in charger and partner at DeLille Field Commercial Real Estate, the listing agency.
The asking price in the listing is $175,000.
The building featuring a three-story façade built to resemble a classic three-tier chest of drawers last sold in 2018 for $52,500. The buyer and current owner is the Nido & Mariana Quebein Children’s Museum. It had sold three years earlier for $60,000 in 2015 to Carol and Mark Milligan.
While lacking official landmark status, the building and its origin story is a window into the story of High Point’s, and by extension, the Triad’s, industrial history.
It was built for the High Point Chamber of Commerce in 1926. The chamber engaged in what came to be known as a dad joke: It was the “Bureau of Information.”
Originally on a lot in a city park at Main and Church Streets, it was built to resemble a bureau typical of those actually built in and around High Point at the time, High Point Museum Curator of Collections Marian Inabinett said.
It had a sign on top resembling a mirror, and at one time the Chamber had “The Industrial City” slogan on it.
It got its present look when designer Sid Lenger, who’d done work for several area furniture companies and designed the giant high boy dresser at Furnitureland South, thought it looked too dated. After a 1990s fund drive, the revision resulted in its present American colonial style — along with two dangling socks to reflect the hosiery industry that also grew up in and around High Point in the 20th century.
It’s not a style that would have typically been made in High Point, Inabinett noted.
In between, the North Carolina Jaycees bought the property and used it as an office, moving it to its present site and adding a one-story brick building to the rear that’s still part of the property.
An image the High Point Museum has from the building’s Chamber bureau days shows a window on one side of the building, an indication of how it was used at the time. The Jaycees later put their name on the sign on top designed to resemble a mirror, along with the brick addition to the rear.
The building of about 2,400 square feet sits on a site of about a fifth of an acre, according to Guilford County property records. There’s depreciation, and the total assessed value is listed as $257,900.
Inabinett is working on an updated blog post about the bureau/chest of drawers as it nears its centennial. It was built five years after the first furniture exposition hall in High Point opened. This year’s spring High Point Market, an event dating to 1909, began Saturday and runs through Wednesday.
The museum acquired the property to help preserve the landmark and to get temporary workspace, but it’s not part of the museum’s core operations and its campus, Executive Director Megan Ward told the High Point Enterprise.