About The Big Chair
Thomasville did not settle for calling itself a furniture town. It put a chair roughly thirty feet tall in the middle of downtown.
The city’s first giant chair appeared in 1922. That wooden version stood about sixteen and a half feet tall and served as an oversized advertisement for Thomasville’s furniture industry. Exposure eventually took its toll, and the original was removed in 1936.
A much larger replacement followed in the early 1950s. Built from steel and concrete, the current chair turned an ordinary piece of household furniture into a downtown monument substantial enough to survive North Carolina weather far better than its predecessor.
The Big Chair remains one of Thomasville’s defining landmarks and an especially pure example of roadside gigantism. There is no complicated interpretation required. It is simply a chair built at a scale that makes every person standing beside it look like dollhouse furniture.