The Lane Co., Inc. began making miniature cedar chests in 1925. In 1930 the company's savvy sales manager came up with the great promotional idea of giving them away to girls graduating from high school in the hopes that their parents would buy them full-size cedar chests to celebrate their graduation or that they would buy a chest when they had homes of their own. Girls were sent an invitation from Lane to pick up one of the cedar boxes from a local furniture store. By 1984 more than 15 million of the small chests had been given away. (The promotion must have been a spectacular success, because every household I remember when I was growing up had a Lane cedar chest. I had my mother's and my grandmother's for years, and my daughter still has a very mid-century style Lane chest that belonged to a relative.) Many girls finishing high school from 1930 through the mid-1980s have held onto their miniature Lane cedar chests and still keep high school mementos locked inside. Other less sentimental girls have allowed their chests to meet the fate of so many other mid-century pieces that have been lost to landfills or sold in garage sales. From fundinguniverse.com Lane graduation box alleewillis.com 1950s Lane cedar chest ad vintageadbrowser.com