Bicentennial Giant Chair

Gardner calls itself the Chair City, and it keeps a very large chair on Elm Street to prove it. The Bicentennial Giant Chair, made of Honduras mahogany by Leon LaPlante, stands about 20 feet tall in front of the former Helen Mae Sauter School. According to Gardner Magazine it was placed there on 23 June 1976 and formally dedicated on 4 July 1976, in the nation's bicentennial year.

It is the latest in a line of big Gardner chairs. Gardner Magazine says the first was built in 1905 by George C. Goodale of the Philander Derby Company as a float for that year's Labor Day parade and later stood at Union Station. In 1935 it was replaced by a 16-foot Colonial Hitchcock chair from the Heywood Wakefield Company, which moved around town until it was removed from the old town hall site after about ten years because of rot in a leg. The city then had no big chair from 1973 until the 1976 version arrived.