The Lane cedar chest: the moth-proof lock that trapped children, and how to date one from the serial number

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 20, 2026

The Hazard Files, Case No. 003. Between 1912 and 1987 a factory in Altavista, Virginia built about twelve million cedar chests whose lids locked themselves the moment they fell shut. The lock was patented, advertised and insured as the thing that kept moths out. Fourteen children suffocated inside them. The chests were recalled in 1996, the company paid a $900,000 federal penalty in 2001, the last replacement lock went out in January 2023, and the chests themselves are in half the estate sales in America at a few hundred dollars each. Case No. 002 was the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab, the toy nobody regulated and almost nobody bought. This is its opposite in every column.

What a Lane cedar chest is

A Lane cedar chest is a lidded storage box roughly four feet wide, a foot and a half deep and twenty to thirty inches high, with a carcass of aromatic red cedar and, on most of them, an outer veneer of walnut, mahogany, oak or cherry over the cedar so that it could pass as furniture in a bedroom. The cedar is the point. Eastern red cedar oil is toxic to clothes-moth larvae, and a tight cedar box was the pre-war answer to the question of where to keep the wool blankets and the wedding linens between seasons. Lane sold it as a hope chest: the box a young woman filled with household linens before marriage, and the box her fiancé bought her when he shipped out. The Virginia Museum of History and Culture, which holds one, records the company slogan as "The gift that starts the home," a Shirley Temple campaign aimed at young women, and wartime advertisements pairing "romantic images of men in uniform and their fiancees with patriotic slogans" to sell chests to soldiers.

The factory stood at the junction of the Virginian and Southern railways in Altavista, Campbell County, Virginia. It opened in 1912 as a packing-box plant, was incorporated as the Standard Red Cedar Chest Company, and a 1921 photograph in the Smithsonian's Archives Center, taken by the engineering firm Lockwood-Greene, still carries that name. The rename to The Lane Company came in 1922, and the federal trademark record dates it to the day: the LANE mark, registration 573,867, filed July 28, 1952, swears a first use in commerce of July 18, 1922, for cedar furniture "designed for the destroying of and the protection against moths and eggs and worms in clothing." The company made ammunition boxes for the government in the First World War, and the museum credits that contract with the assembly-line method that let it mass-produce chests afterward. By 1930 the plant was turning out 250 to 300 chests a day under a 150-foot brick smokestack, built in 1926, with LANE CHESTS lettered down the side toward the railroad. The stack is still standing; the factory around it is not. The last chest came off the Altavista line in the summer of 2001.

The chests changed with the decades and are easiest to sort by eye. The 1920s and early 1930s pieces are carved and traditional, often in solid cedar with a cedar lid. The late 1930s and 1940s brought the waterfall, an Art Deco form with a rounded front lid edge and bookmatched or inlaid veneers, which is the chest most people picture. Chippendale reproductions with ball-and-claw feet ran alongside. From the 1950s the line went mid-century: blond oak, walnut cases on tapered legs, an upholstered top that turned the chest into a bench, a felt-lined lift-out tray, sometimes a drawer below. Lane sold a cheaper line under a second name, VIRGINIA MAID, whose trademark record (registration 734,904) swears a first use of May 6, 1938, and a SWEETHEART CHEST mark whose first use is sworn as March 1959, later than the wartime advertising that word calls to mind. All three brands are in the recall.

Why the lid locked itself: five patents

Between April 1928 and September 1933 The Lane Company filed five United States patents, and read together they are an engineering program with one goal: make the box airtight so the cedar vapor inside reaches a concentration that kills moth larvae, and keep it that way whether or not the owner cooperates. The lock is the fourth piece of that program, and its own text says so.

The first is US 1,756,746, "Cedar chest," filed April 27, 1928 by John R. Hogan of Altavista and granted April 29, 1930. It puts a resilient curved metal sealing strip along the underside of the lid so that the joint between lid and box is "proof against dust, moisture, and moths" even when the boards have warped and even, in Hogan's words, "when the top is not fully closed." The reasoning is in the specification: "the more dense the aroma the better moth killer it is." The second is US 1,759,401, "Lock," filed by the same Hogan on November 13, 1928 and granted May 20, 1930. Its stated problem is the owner. The chest is built to seal, Hogan writes, but "this object is frequently defeated by the failure of users to see that tops are tightly closed and locked in that position." His answer is a keeper that catches the lid's latch so that "in the mere act of closing the lid of the chest it is automatically latched in such closed position." A combined key pin and push button on the outside releases it; a turn of the key locks the button. Nothing in the patent contemplates anyone being inside.

The third is US 1,890,999, another "Cedar chest," filed August 22, 1929 by Lawrence K. Loftin and granted December 13, 1932, which jogs the corner joints into a "tortuous" path so that vapor cannot leak through them, and explains why it matters: cedar aroma, "that is cedar oil molecules in suspension in air, is approximately seven times as heavy as air," so it pools in the bottom of the box and escapes through any gap. The fourth is US 1,808,838, "Method of aroma testing of cedar chests," filed July 18, 1930 by Ernest C. Crocker and granted June 9, 1931, which hangs rosin-coated cheesecloth inside a chest and weighs it daily to measure the milligrams of cedar oil it absorbs, so that a factory could certify a chest lethal to larvae before it shipped. The fifth, US 1,960,642, "Lid support for cedar chests," filed September 15, 1933 by Grady A. Loftin and granted May 29, 1934, moves the lid stay to the outside of the box because cedar vapor leaves "a gummy coating which is liable to stain" on interior metal. All five are assigned to The Lane Company, Inc.

The commercial side of the same program is on the record too. From 1930 Lane issued a free insurance policy with each chest covering the contents against moth damage. A policy like that only pays if the box is shut, and a box that shuts itself is the cheapest way to make sure it is. Set beside the Anglepoise, where the patents show an engineer turning into a licensor, or the Emeralite, where a design patent and a trademark protect the same lamp in different years, the Lane filings show something rarer: the exact moment a safety hazard was designed on purpose, for a reason that made sense, by people solving a different problem.

What the recall actually said, 1996 to 2023

The Consumer Product Safety Commission's release 96-186 of September 4, 1996 announced that Lane, "in cooperation with" the Commission, was recalling "approximately 12 million cedar chests from 1912 to 1987" whose lids "latch automatically when the lid is closed." Six children had died between 1977 and 1994, "from 21 months to ten years old." The notice printed the test that this guide repeats in the figure above: close the lid without pressing the button and try to open it; "if the lid opens, the chest has the new lock and does not need to be replaced. If the lid does not open, it has the old lock." It added that the old locks "click loudly when the lid is shut." Lane offered a new lock free, one that could only be latched by hand from outside, and said it would make "special arrangements for consumers who need additional help installing the locks."

Release 00-084 of March 30, 2000 asked the public to look again, reporting "another suffocation death and two near fatalities" since 1996. On July 6, 2001 the Commission announced that Lane had agreed to pay a $900,000 civil penalty for failing to report the hazard promptly. Before April 1996, the agency said, the company "had received reports that five children suffocated inside these older cedar chests," and two more deaths and two near-fatalities followed. Lane paid while denying it had broken the law, which is the usual shape of such settlements. In January 2002 the company, by then Lane Home Furnishings of Tupelo, Mississippi, estimated that 6.5 million of the 12 million chests still existed, and its chief executive described the fix: the new locks, "which have been installed on all Lane chests since 1987, must be latched manually from outside the chest," and swapping one takes a screwdriver.

On January 12, 2014 an eight-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother were found inside a Lane chest in a bedroom in Franklin, Massachusetts, and died. The chest had been bought used more than a decade earlier. The press reported its manufacture date as July 13, 1939, which is what the serial number system yields; the Commission's notice called it "75 years old, recalled in 1996." The agency's 2014 warning put the wider toll at 34 child deaths since 1996 in storage and toy chests of every make. Connecticut's consumer department restated the recall in October 2015 with two details the federal notices leave out: the replacement hardware fit chests made from 1940 onward, and the serial and style numbers a caller needed are "branded on the outside bottom or back." The Commission's July 11, 2018 release counted fourteen children dead in Lane and Virginia Maid chests between 1977 and 2015 and asked owners to replace or remove the lock. A January 31, 2023 update to that page records the end of the program: replacement latches and locks "are no longer available," and the instruction became to "completely remove the locks" from any recalled chest. There is no longer a company to call. Lane went to Interco in 1987, through Interco's bankruptcy to Furniture Brands International, through that company's 2013 bankruptcy to Heritage Home Group, and in November 2017 to United Furniture Industries, which on November 21, 2022 dismissed its 2,700 employees by overnight email and text and stopped trading.

The same latch killed elsewhere. In May 2020 the Commission issued a separate warning for Cavalier Corporation chests, made in Tennessee since the early 1900s with the same self-locking lid, after three children died between 2004 and 2019; there was no company left to run a recall, so the notice simply told owners to remove the lock. Other makers used self-latching lids as well; the Commission's guidance to resellers speaks of "trunks, wicker chests, and wooden storage chests" generally. Lane's are the ones with a federal recall file because there were twelve million of them.

How to date one from the serial number

Lane branded a serial number into the wood on the outside of the bottom or the back panel, beside a separate style number, and the serial is the manufacture date written backwards. Read the digits from right to left and they fall into month, day and year: 658101 becomes 10 18 56, October 18, 1956; 153040 becomes April 3, 1951. A six-digit serial is the whole date. A seven-digit serial carries a plant code as its first digit, and the remaining six read the same way. This is the method the collector site Lane Cedar Box has checked against more than a hundred stamped miniature boxes and calls "well established on the full sized chests," and it is the method that yields the July 13, 1939 date reported for the Franklin chest. The figure below runs that date back through the system.

Two cautions. First, the style number beside the serial is a model code, and on this system it does not date anything; a chest with a legible style number and no serial has to be dated by its form. Second, the trade guides that repeat the method sometimes get their own examples wrong. One widely copied page reads the serial 248290 as September 28, 1924, which is what you get by reversing the digits in pairs. Reversed digit by digit, 248290 is 092842, September 28, 1942, and 1942 is also the year a waterfall chest of that description was being made. When a seller's date and the serial disagree, redo the reversal yourself before deciding who is right.

The serial dates the chest and nothing else. A brass Lane plate, a paper label naming the retailer, or a dealer's pencil note inside the lid can be years younger than the wood, because stock sat in warehouses and on showroom floors, and the miniatures especially were handed out from dealer inventory long after Altavista stamped them. Read the wood. The plate corroborates; it does not testify.

How to tell a real one

Twelve million Lane chests were made, so the base rate favors the seller: a chest described as Lane usually is one. The risks run the other way. A Lane chest missing its identification is sold as generic and underpriced, a competitor's chest is sold as Lane and overpriced, and a chest of any make with its automatic lock intact is sold at all. Seven checks, in the order they cost you nothing.

• Find the brand. The recall notices say the name Lane or Virginia Maid is "located inside the cedar chest," and that is where the paper label or the small brass plate usually sits, on the inside of the lid or the front rail under it. Absence proves nothing, since paper labels go and plates are pried off, so go to the bottom next.
• Turn it over and read the brand marks in the wood. The serial and style numbers are burned into the outside of the bottom or the back. A branded serial that reverses into a real calendar date is stronger evidence of Lane than any plate, because no competitor used the system.
• Do the lid test. Close it with the button untouched. A lid that holds is the 1912-to-1987 lock and the chest is in the recall as it stands. A lid that lifts free is a post-1987 chest, a replacement lock from the recall program, or a lock already removed. Any of the three is fine to own; only the first is a problem.
• Smell the inside. A Lane interior still smells of cedar decades on, and a chest that smells of nothing has either been painted or sealed inside, which killed the aroma, or was never cedar. The 1929 Loftin patent says the vapor pools at the bottom, so put your nose there.
• Look at the lid edge for the sealing strip. The 1928 Hogan patent's curved metal strip runs along the underside of the lid where it meets the box. It is often missing on chests that have been refinished. Its presence dates the construction to the patented design; its absence is only a refinishing clue.
• Look at the lid stay. On chests from the mid-1930s onward the folding stay should sit outside the cedar, per the 1933 patent, precisely so that cedar vapor cannot gum it. A gummy brown coating on an interior stay is exactly the fault the patent describes and is normal on the earlier chests.
• Match the form to the serial. A waterfall front with a 1950s serial, or tapered legs with a 1930s one, means the serial belongs to another chest or the piece has been assembled. The style eras in the first section are coarse but reliable.

The look-alikes, and the miniature that is not a salesman's sample

Every cedar chest maker in America wanted to be Lane, and in a bedroom under a blanket most of them look alike. What separates them is the marking, and in one case the marketing.

What it is	How it fools you	How to place it
Ed Roos Company, Forest Park, Illinois, from 1918	Same forms, same decades, and Roos gave miniatures to girl graduates too	Roos stamped its name inside the lid together with the National Association of Cedar Chest Manufacturers mark; no reversed-date serial. The lid test applies to every maker, since the recall guidance covers automatic locks of any brand
Cavalier Corporation, formerly Tennessee Furniture Company	Self-locking lid identical in effect to Lane's; sold from the early 1900s	Logo and name imprinted inside the lid, though the Commission's 2020 notice says "not all of the chests have the logo and name." Three child deaths 2004 to 2019, no recall program, remove the lock
Virginia Maid	Sold as a different maker at a discount, or as a rare one at a premium	Lane's own second brand, first use May 6, 1938. Same factory, same lock, same recall. The serial system applies
Post-1987 Lane and Lane Home Furnishings chests	Carry the Lane name and the cedar lining	The lock must be latched by hand from outside. The museum's phrasing is that the last Lane chest made in the United States left the line in 2001, so a later one was made somewhere else, whatever the label art says
New cedar chests, Amish and otherwise, on Etsy and in furniture stores	Listed in the same search results at $1,249 and up	New wood, no serial, no recall. Worth what a new piece of furniture is worth, which is less than the listing hopes
Lane occasional tables, dressers and Acclaim case pieces	Also marked Lane, also collected, also called "Lane cedar" by sellers who have not opened them	No cedar carcass and no lock. Different objects, same company, a story for another guide

The miniature is the look-alike that deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most common Lane object of all and the most misdescribed. From the late 1920s until about 2004 Lane ran what it called the Girl Graduate Plan: a dealer in each town got the names of the girls in the graduating class, sent each one a card, and when she came into the store with her parents to collect her free miniature cedar chest, the dealer suggested a full-size one as her graduation present. The boxes are about nine inches long and four wide, of solid cedar with a lock and a key, and a small plate inside the lid names the store that gave it away: Falconer Furniture, Butler Furniture of Roseboro, North Carolina, a store in Lindsay, Oklahoma. Lane's own figures, as the collector site Lane Cedar Box reports them, are that by 1962 seven million girls had received one and that between half and two-thirds of every graduating class was being offered a box; the company's corporate history puts the total at more than fifteen million by 1984, and Lane executives later estimated 27 million in all. They are listed on every marketplace as salesman's samples. They were premiums, given away by the million, and one key fits every one of them.

What it sells for

No published realized price was found for a Lane cedar chest. The auction aggregators show lots and hide the hammer behind a subscription, and the estate auctioneers who actually sell these chests every weekend do not publish results. Every figure in this section is an asking price, gathered from live listings on September 20, 2026, and an asking price is what a seller hopes, which for furniture that has to be collected in a truck is often far above what it brings.

What	Asking	Where, and what the seller said
Miniature graduation box, no key	$9.99 to $30	eBay, "Falconer Furniture Co." plate at $9.99; a nine-inch box with hinged lid at $30
Miniature, better plate or 1950s date claimed	$32 to $55	Etsy: Butler Furniture of Roseboro, NC at $44; Lindsay, Oklahoma at $55; the collector site's own rule of thumb is "around $25.00" online and "a couple of dollars" at a garage sale
Full-size chest, local pickup, ordinary condition	$150	eBay, carved wedding-scene "Love Chest," local pickup only
Virginia Maid upholstered bench chest	$300, reduced from $1,200	Chairish, 41 inches wide; a 75 percent cut on the same listing is the clearest signal in this table
Mid-century Lane, mahogany, walnut or blond oak	$676 to $1,050	eBay $675.75 and $825; Chairish $785 (1957 blond oak, reduced from $999) to $1,050, style numbers 6113, 6587, 6633, 6657 quoted in the titles
Waterfall Art Deco, late 1930s to 1940s	$760 to $1,200	eBay $760 with $148 freight; Chairish $1,200; one Chairish seller dates a chest to 1934 at $895
"Antique vintage Lane cedar chest, lock removed"	$2,200	eBay, the top of the field, and the recall remedy is in the title as a selling point
Circa 1960 Acclaim walnut cedar chest	Withheld	1stDibs, 45 by 17.5 by 20.5 inches, original green velvet tray; the dealer shows everything except the number

Three things stand out. The Virginia Maid listing cut from $1,200 to $300 is the only price movement visible in the whole field, and it moved in the direction furniture prices move when a seller has to pay for storage. The dealer band of $785 to $1,200 on Chairish is remarkably flat across thirty years of styles, which says the market is paying for a cedar-lined bench in a photogenic finish, and the decade is secondary. And the highest asking price on eBay leads with the words "Lock Removed." Twenty-seven years after the recall, the fix is a feature, which is where this guide started. The miniatures are a different market entirely, priced by the town on the plate and by whether the key is in the lock, and at $25 they are the cheapest way to own a Lane.

Where the records disagree

This is a company with a state museum page, a Hall of Fame biography, a fan site built from company records, two corporate histories and a shelf of federal notices, and they do not agree with each other on the basics. The disagreements are listed rather than resolved, because on several of them there is no way to pick from here.

Who founded it. The Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame both say Edward Hudson Lane (1891 to 1973) founded the company in 1912; the Hall of Fame has him buying the box plant at a bankruptcy auction at twenty-one and starting with five employees and ten to fifteen chests a day. The Lane Cedar Box history and the corporate chronology in the standard reference works say his father, John Edward Lane, bought the plant for $500 and installed the son as vice president and general manager, with the father as president until his death in 1930. The two accounts share every fact except the name on the deed.

When the miniatures began, and how many there were. The company chronology says 1925. The Lane Cedar Box FAQ says 1925 to 2004 on one page, "the late 1920s" on another, and credits a sales manager, J. Arthur Krauss, with starting it "in the 1930s" on a third. On the count: seven million by 1962 per E. H. Lane's own address that year, more than fifteen million by 1984 per the corporate history, and "at least 27 million between 1930 and 1998" per Lane executives quoted by the fan site, which elsewhere says the miniature department closed around 2004. All of these can be true at once, and none is a number you can check.

How many children had died when the recall began. The September 1996 recall notice says six, between 1977 and 1994. The 2001 penalty announcement says Lane knew of five before April 1996. The 2000 renewal counts one more death and two near-fatalities. The 2014 warning says 34 since 1996, but across every make and kind of storage and toy chest. The 2018 notice says fourteen in Lane and Virginia Maid chests, 1977 to 2015. Fourteen is the figure this guide uses because it is the latest one the Commission attached to this product alone.

How many chests still exist. Twelve million were made. Lane said 6.5 million survived in 2002. Nobody has counted since, and there is no one left to count.

The 1922 name. The museum and the corporate histories say The Lane Company; the trade guides say Lane Furniture Company. The trademark filing of 1952 reads "Lane Company, Inc., The." The 1921 Smithsonian photograph is the last document consulted here to use the Standard Red Cedar Chest name.

The serial number. Every source that describes it agrees on the reversed-date method. They disagree, by example, on how to do the reversal, as the dating section explains, and the manufacturer's own advice while it existed was to call customer service because "over its history it has used more than one serial-number system." That line survives on a trade page; the customer service line does not.

Is it legal to sell one

This is a description of what the documents say, and this shop is not a law firm. Section 19 of the Consumer Product Safety Act, at 15 U.S.C. 2068(a)(2)(B), makes it unlawful for any person to "sell, offer for sale, manufacture for sale, distribute in commerce, or import" a consumer product that is "subject to voluntary corrective action taken by the manufacturer, in consultation with the Commission, of which action the Commission has notified the public," where the seller "knew or should have known" of it. The Lane recall was exactly that kind of action, and the Commission has notified the public of it in 1996, 2000, 2001, 2014, 2018 and 2023. The Commission's Resellers Guide to Selling Safer Products, revised February 2025, says the prohibition reaches "thrift stores, consignment stores, charities, and individuals holding yard sales and flea markets" and "resellers (including those who sell on auction websites)," and it names this object: resellers should "destroy storage chests with automatic locks, such as trunks, wicker chests, and wooden storage chests that have been recalled. Children have also died in these chests."

The recall's own remedy is the way through. What Lane recalled was the lock, the fix Lane offered was a different lock, and when the replacement locks ran out the Commission's stated instruction became to "completely remove the locks" to "eliminate the hazard." A chest whose automatic lock has been taken off is a chest on which the corrective action has been carried out, and that is the object the Chairish dealers, the estate auctioneers and the eBay seller at $2,200 are selling. A chest that still latches itself is the recalled product as recalled, and the Commission's guidance to anyone reselling it is a single word. The practical rule for a shop or a booth is the one in the callout above: the lock comes off before the price tag goes on, and the listing says so. Compare lawn darts, where no modification makes the set legal to sell, and the Atomic Energy Lab, where nothing was ever required. The cedar chest sits between them: legal, on a condition, and the condition is a screwdriver.

One more practical point, since these chests move by freight. A Lane chest is heavy, the veneer chips at the corners, and the lid is the part that arrives broken. The packing guide covers crating a case piece; the short version is that the lid ships strapped shut, and after this guide you will understand why it must be strapped rather than latched.

The hazard that was a feature

Case No. 001 was a toy whose danger was the game: a weighted steel spike you threw across a lawn. Case No. 002 was a toy whose danger was the lesson: real uranium ore in a suitcase, with the government's blessing. Case No. 003 is furniture whose danger was a solution. The men in Altavista were trying to kill moths. They measured cedar vapor in milligrams per day, they learned it was seven times heavier than air and pooled at the bottom of the box, they sealed the joints and the lid edge, they moved the hardware outside so the vapor would not gum it, and then, because the owner kept leaving the lid up, they made the lid lock itself. Every one of those decisions is documented in a patent with a drawing, and every one of them was good engineering. Together they built a box that a child could climb into and could not climb out of, and they built twelve million of them.

The market has done with this what it does with everything in this series, which is to price the object and ignore the file. Lawn darts are worth a few hundred dollars because it is illegal to sell them. The Atomic Energy Lab is worth five figures because there were never many. The Lane chest is worth a few hundred dollars because there are millions, and the fact that fourteen children died in them moves the price not at all, except that the seller with the highest asking price on eBay has put the fix in the headline. That is the right instinct. Take the lock off, say so, and sell the cedar; the cedar was always the point.

Case No. 004 will invert this one. The Field Guides index has every guide on the site; the Dansk guide is the other place on this site where a mark dates a decade; the Stickley Morris chair is the other American furniture story here that runs from a patent office to an estate sale; and the 1950s entry in the decade series covers the graduating class that got the little boxes.