(Not Just) Another Roadside Attraction

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Whenever a town is looking to make a splash, it’s usually by going big. This was likely what High Point’s Chamber of Commerce had in mind when they built the “World’s Largest Chest of Drawers” in 1926. 

The Chamber needed a new office, the region’s furniture manufacturing sector was surging, and High Point sought to establish itself as an industrial city. Add in the burgeoning popularity of car travel and the growing allure of a new, particularly American kind of “folk architecture”—the roadside attraction—and you get a 32-foot-high structure designed to look like…oversized bedroom furniture. Its primary purpose, according to one local newspaper, was “to advertise this, the world’s greatest furniture center.” 

But it had another purpose. Just four years earlier, nearby Thomasville had debuted a 16-foot-tall Duncan Phyfe Chair. High Point felt it needed a jumbo piece of furniture that could, as the newspaper said, “rival in uniqueness the giant chair that advertises Thomasville as the foremost chair-making city in America.”

I’m drawn to oddities and anomalies of all sorts and seek them out any chance I get. I’ve spent hours examining the World’s Largest Miniature Circus and months searching for strange and alien slime molds. So, when I heard High Point’s most famous building was up for sale this spring (for a mere $175,000,) I wanted to know more. 

The original giant Bureau cost all of $5,000 and featured four drawers topped by a pane of glass resembling a mirror. It served as both a calling card for the city and a visual pun: The Bureau doubled as the town’s visitor’s bureau, with a large office inside and restrooms for passers-by. The interior was paneled with a variety of fine woods, such as cherry, satinwood, walnut, and mahogany, to showcase the materials used in the area’s furniture factories. 

The story of this iconic building is so deeply woven into High Point’s identity—a Chamber executive once claimed it had generated “millions of dollars’ worth of publicity”—that, in the 1990s, civic boosters raised $100,000 to give it a facelift. Furniture designer Sid Lenger led the redesign. (A few years later, he would also design the World’s Largest Highboy just down the road in Jamestown).

The renovation literally raised the Bureau’s profile—to 38 feet—and remade it as an American Colonial chest of drawers painted to look like cherry wood with brass fittings. In a nod to High Point’s hosiery industry, two giant socks were added, dangling from the middle drawer. The refreshed attraction was reimagined as a testament to the town’s reputation as the “Furniture Capital of the World.”

But as the Drawers (as they were later known) were getting their modern revamp, the bottom fell out of the furniture manufacturing industry. New trade agreements with China made it cheaper to sell imported goods than manufacture them locally. Nearly 50 North Carolina-based furniture companies closed during the 1990s, a trend that continued in the decades to follow. Between 1990 and 2025, furniture manufacturing jobs in the region declined by 69%.

The city had to shift its focus from furniture production to furniture design and sales, doubling down on the semiannual High Point Market, the world’s largest home furnishings trade show, which draws more than 80,000 visitors to the area. 

The Drawers’ meaning shifted, too. Once a forward-looking symbol of 1920s boosterism, it’s now a more retrospective monument to the city’s past. Marian Inabinett, the curator of collections at the High Point Museum, says it remains a topic of conversation in town and a draw for visitors. “We still have people come, you know, they want postcards [for] the bureau,” she told me. “It’s still something that people want to see and have their pictures taken in front of.” 

While the Drawers might appear a little out of step with present-day High Point, they still tell a larger story about what sets the city apart. And so I wondered: Do other roadside attractions still carry meaning for the communities that host them, or are they just a repository for vague yearnings about lost Americana?

Quirky and Kooky

To understand the role that roadside attractions have played in North Carolina’s history and culture, you have to go back to the rise of the automobile in the 1920s. The widespread ownership of personal cars made leisure travel possible for many Americans, but it also required a more robust network of roads. 

Route 66 from Chicago to California opened in 1926, connecting small towns with big cities and ushering in a new kind of tourism: the road trip. As demand grew for food, lodging, and fuel, small business owners along America’s highways had to find new ways to make their offerings stand out. They built eye-catching stores and statues that could be seen from miles away to lure in weary travelers.

Roadtrippers themselves also developed an appetite for novelty: they wanted fun places to stop and look around, take pictures, buy postcards and souvenirs. This trend spread throughout the country, giving rise to iconic behemoths such as the World’s Largest Ball of Twine (there are at least four), the World’s Largest Frying Pan (there are at least six, including one in Rose Hill), South of the Border, the Weeki Wachee mermaids, and countless others.

Roadside attractions come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but generally fit three main categories.

The most familiar are the larger-than-life boosterism spectacles like High Point’s Chest of Drawers. There’s something about the idea of enormity that looms large in the American imagination, says historian Leslie Goddard, who lectures extensively on mid-century American popular culture. The obsession with size, she posits, is likely tied to popular notions of the country’s vast scale and to mythologies of its exploration. Goddard notes these are especially useful in helping communities establish and communicate their own sense of civic identity. 

The second type features something you have to enter a small business or dwelling to see, usually a curated display of oddities or a themed collection. (Classic examples might be wax museums or a cabinet of curiosities.) The third type is what Goddard calls the “vernacular roadside attraction,” more akin to folk art, which starts out as a personal project or hobby and grows into a beloved local icon.

“It’s still something that people want to see and have their pictures taken in front of.”

Marian Inabinett, curator of collections at the High Point Museum

“There’s so much in the human imagination that’s always going to resist being put into little boxes,” she told me. “One of my favorite parts of roadside entrepreneurship is just how incredibly creative and funny and imaginative these attractions can be. That is the spirit that animates them.”

No matter what form they take, roadside attractions must be attention-grabbing and easily accessible from travel routes, says Goddard. They must also offer a reward of some kind, something out of the ordinary, but not too engrossing. They’re not really made for long visits. Instead, they are the petit fours on the buffet of American tourism, offering small delights on the way to something bigger.

Roadside attractions of all stripes flourished through the 1960s, but major changes reshaped travel across the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century. The buildout of the federal interstate highway system, which started in the 1950s, funneled travelers into tight travel corridors with fewer opportunities to pull off for a quick stop.

At the same time, franchises and chains grew in popularity, so when motorists took a break, they began to seek out their favorite restaurants and gas stations over the local offerings, no matter how dramatic their signage, architecture, or giant statuary might be. In addition, air travel became more affordable. The golden age of roadside attractions began to wane.

Starved of attention and tourist dollars, many disappeared. By the time the interstate system was declared complete in the mid 1990s, the American landscape had lost much of what Goddard calls “a delightful quirkiness and kookiness.” 

Facing Uncertainty

In North Carolina, running an oddity of any type is not easy, as Stephen Barcelo has learned the hard way. When you step into his Paranormal and Cryptozoology Museum in Littleton, he’s likely to offer you a K-II meter, a small handheld device that detects electromagnetic fields. Ghost hunters contend that the presence of otherworldly entities can distort these fields, causing the meters to light up. 

You can wander through the museum’s exhibits on Bigfoot and otherworldly phenomena, or you can scan the many supposedly cursed items Barcelo has received from people in a hurry to get rid of them. You might find a haunted doll. 

Or…a haunted wall socket. The uncertainty is part of the thrill.

Barcelo’s museum, which he opened 14 years ago, is a bit strange for a town with roughly 500 residents and one stoplight, but he’s proud to be part of what he sees as a particularly American tradition. He loves “a little bit of the hokiness” of roadside attractions because they add flavor to the monotone world of highway travel.

“How many times has a roadside attraction been the lifeblood of the town?” he said when I visited. “A lot of these towns have nothing else much going on.”

On a good day, Barcelo might welcome as many as 80 guests. The museum is open year-round, but he counts on the summer months to keep the enterprise afloat. He’s located near Lake Gaston on the Virginia border, between I-85 to the west and I-95 to the east, so most visitors take a detour from the highway to see his collection, housed in a squat cinderblock building painted with colorful murals of UFOs and a Sasquatch. 

“How many times has a roadside attraction been the lifeblood of the town? A lot of these towns have nothing else much going on.”

Stephen Barcelo, proprietor of the Paranormal and Cryptozoology Museum

While attractions like Barcelo’s are often beloved, they are, by their nature, rather fragile. They are usually powered by personal passion and a skeleton crew. For those that rely on admission fees and merchandise sales, a few bad seasons—or skyrocketing gas prices—can spell doom. 

“Roadside attractions are just hurting now,” Barcelo said. In the past year, he’s seen a significant drop in international tourists, coupled with unpredictable tariffs, making it harder to turn a profit in the museum’s gift shop.

He’s shifted his attention to producing content for YouTube as a way to expand his reach and, hopefully, draw in new visitors. A good video can be the modern equivalent of the glowing neon sign along the highway.

Barcelo still gets a kick out of seeing a guest’s eyes light up when their K-II meter flashes, but the uncertainty he’s now facing is not the kind he usually dabbles in. 

Authentic Experiences

Does this mean roadside attractions have outlived their usefulness—that they are now just anachronisms? Not exactly. 

When I call up Scott Peacock, director of marketing and communications for Visit NC, to ask if these oddities still have a role to play in North Carolina’s tourism industry, he tells me that, despite how dire things may look, his office fields more questions about them now than ever.

“More and more people want to know: What’s something only [found] in North Carolina, or what’s something unique and quirky?” he says. “That desire for those types of places has only grown really over the last decade.” He thinks the increased interest is part of a trend of travelers seeking out experiences that feel authentic and unexpected, rather than mass-produced. They’re especially eager to use the attractions as backdrops for their own social media posts and videos. 

“It was always there, but it’s really become more popular,” said Peacock. “When we post content, whether that’s online, social, whatever, if this is the topic of it, it’s going to be a high performer. People are curious and want to discover these places and know more about them because of the fact that they’re often a one-of-one.” 

Demand for these sorts of novelties has grown so much, in fact, that Visit NC is launching a campaign to highlight the more offbeat attractions. Scattered across the state, they appeal to every possible flavor of curiosity and spectacle, including (but by no means limited to): American Museum of the House Cat (Sylva), Mystery Hill (Blowing Rock), Marvin Johnson’s Gourd Collection (Angier), Wheels Through Time Museum (Maggie Valley), Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park (Wilson), a pair of scandalous giant legs (Henderson), the Mary’s Gone Wild compound (Supply), and Digger’s Dungeon, home of the most famous of all monster trucks: Grave Digger (Poplar Branch).

When you detour to see these attractions, Peacock believes, there’s a little bit of magic bundled into the experience. You may think you’re stopping at Rose Hill to see an enormous frying pan, but “you end up leaving with a deeper understanding of the area than you would have just by driving by [and] grabbing the picture,” he says.  

For the communities where they’re located, a good roadside attraction can come to mean much more than just the tourism dollars it draws in. They can define a region’s character, provide a unique sense of place, and embody the mythologies we cherish.

Lost Horizon

Having seen colossal spectacles in High Point and oddities in Littleton, I rounded out my survey of roadside attractions with something a bit stranger. Something surprisingly small.

I found it on a sparsely populated stretch of Highway 86 in Caswell County, northwest of Durham, where the two-lane road seems nearly empty except for a volunteer fire department outpost and the village of Shangri-La, the entirety of which fits within the confines of a single residential front yard.

This tallest in this cluster of 27 miniature buildings, built out of quartz, brick, cinder blocks, and concrete, stands maybe six feet tall. There is a school, a theater, a jail, a church, and grist mill—complete with a water wheel. Each was lovingly hand-crafted by a retired tobacco farmer named Henry Warren. He began the project in 1968 when he was in his mid 70s, and he kept building for the next nine years, right up until his death from cancer in 1977. 

“More and more people want to know: What’s something only [found] in North Carolina, or what’s something unique and quirky?”

Scott Peacock, director of marketing and communications for Visit NC

Warren’s urge to build was evident all over the property: in the winding stone walls, benches, stairs, a tiered bird bath, and the large quartz obelisk at the end of the driveway. The level of detail is so deliberate that it must have taken him hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to construct it all.

Warren never left much in the way of an explanation for his magnum opus, only a quote, etched in stone at the village’s entrance: “Let me live in the house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.” It appears he meant it as a kind of philanthropic gift, an invitation to weary travelers to step away from the real world.

A sense of stillness settled in as I peered at the ornamental details Warren included in every building: decorative brickwork, antique glass insulators, translucent quartz crystals. The solitude of the rural road along with quiet contemplation of his artistry felt like the antidote to the monoculture of the highways and franchises that dominate modern life.  

The sense of discovery was uncanny, as if I was the only person in the world who’d ever found this tiny village. But the guest book, which is tucked into a mailbox to keep it out of the elements, told another story:

“Such a unique, precious and impressive testament to the creativity of the human spirit! Truly one of a kind!” one person wrote.

“As a native North Carolinian, I can’t believe this is my first time here! You are truly a craftsman and this city is amazing and awe-inspiring.”

“Thank you! I’ve been riding past here 50 years, finally took a look.”

“My grandpa would bring us here when I was a little child. Now that we are grown we wanted to pay a visit since we remembered this pretty place.”

“Had a good time. Hope I visit again. He worked so hard. Hard work paid off.”

“Thank you for doing this for tired travellers and local visitors. God bless you all.” 

Some guests had left tiny toys, painted rocks, jewelry, and other small trinkets scattered throughout the buildings, adding their own contributions and rearranging the ones left before. 

Still, Shangri-La seemed fragile too, in its own way. I could see it in the cracks in the weathered concrete, the peeling plywood, the toys bleaching and warping in the sun. It has stood for more than 50 years as an icon in this rural county, but its future, like that of so many roadside attractions, is uncertain. No one really knows what will happen if the private property it sits on is ever sold. If it were to disappear, the community around it would lose a vibrant symbol that draws in the wider world. It would lose an opportunity to spark curiosity and wonder.

North Carolina’s roadside attractions might not dominate the landscape the way they once did; the world around them has changed. But this small village, named after a fictional utopia, reminded me that they do still have a place and a purpose. They offer something people will always need: a chance to see something you’d never see otherwise; a waystop in the liminal space of transit; a brush with the unknown.