Field index

North Carolina Oddities

Unusual destinations, curious landmarks, and worthwhile detours across North Carolina.

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10 documented oddities Highest curiosity first

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Giant Objects

World’s Largest Chest of Drawers

High Point, North Carolina

A building-sized chest of drawers with two enormous socks hanging from one drawer turns High Point's furniture and hosiery history into a piece of architectural advertising.

Curious Landmarks

Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky

Raleigh, North Carolina

A turf-covered stone chamber in an art museum park works as a walk-in camera obscura, projecting an upside-down image of the outside world onto its interior.

Roadside Attractions

Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park

Wilson, North Carolina

Thirty enormous kinetic sculptures made from road signs, bicycle parts, industrial scraps, reflectors, fans, and gears turn a downtown park into a wind-powered mechanical carnival.

Historic Oddities

PARI

Rosman, North Carolina

Two enormous radio dishes and a campus full of space hardware survive at a former NASA and Department of Defense tracking station hidden deep in the…

Curious Landmarks

Shell Service Station

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

A bright yellow concrete seashell survives from a chain of 1930s gas stations that turned the Shell logo into the entire building.

Historic Oddities

Road to Nowhere

Bryson City, North Carolina

A scenic mountain highway abruptly ends at a long, dark tunnel that was completed but never opened to ordinary automobile traffic.

Giant Objects

The Big Chair

Thomasville, North Carolina

A thirty-foot concrete and steel chair towers over downtown Thomasville, replacing an earlier wooden giant that had advertised the city's furniture industry since the 1920s.

Giant Objects

Mickey Coffee Pot

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Two nineteenth-century tinsmiths built an enormous metal coffee pot as an advertisement, creating a landmark capable of holding roughly 740 gallons.

Roadside Attractions

Land of Oz

Beech Mountain, North Carolina

A mountaintop theme park that closed in 1980 still returns for special events, preserving its Yellow Brick Road, storybook scenery, and fragments of a strange 1970s…

Roadside Attractions

Mount Airy Granite Quarry

Mount Airy, North Carolina

An enormous exposure of pale Mount Airy granite has been cut for dimension stone since the nineteenth century, leaving a brilliant white industrial landscape beside the…