If you have driven through downtown High Point this year, you have seen the cranes. A new hotel cleared its purchase agreement with City Council on August 3. The Congdon Foundation has now put more than $40 million into the old hosiery mill campus that became Congdon Yards. A 35,000 square foot dining and entertainment complex is framing up on Lindsay Street. By any measure, this is the biggest concentrated building push downtown has seen in a generation.
None of it drew the crowd that a free wooden troll did.
What the money bought
Here is the ledger, in the order it has landed:
| Project | What it is | Investment / scale | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Downtown hotel (Tara Investments) | 100 to 130 room hotel at 305 and 315 N. Elm Street | $30 million+ | Purchase agreement approved Aug. 3, 2026; construction pending |
| Congdon Yards campus | Mixed-use redevelopment of the former Adams-Millis mill | $40 million+ from the Congdon Foundation | Ongoing since 2018, still adding tenants |
| SpringHill Suites at Congdon Yards | Hotel built into the historic Adam-Millis/Paul Robert showroom building | Not disclosed | Opened fall 2025 |
| City Lake Park | Pool, gym and greenspace overhaul | Roughly $23 million | Reopened 2023 |
| Smitty and Pearl's | Three restaurant concepts plus a duckpin bowling and VR arcade, on Lindsay Street | ~70 jobs | Expected to open later in 2026 |
| Little Sally | 18-foot troll sculpture built from reclaimed wood, near W. Green Drive and W. Grimes Avenue | $0 admission, built by about 40 volunteers | Unveiled Nov. 2025; 31,000+ visitors by late Dec. 2025 |
Look at the last row against the first five. Just the disclosed dollar figures on the hotel, the Congdon Yards campus and the City Lake Park overhaul add up to roughly $93 million, and that is before counting whatever the SpringHill Suites or Smitty and Pearl's cost to build. In the seven weeks after a Danish artist and a crew of local volunteers finished a scrap-wood sculpture behind an abandoned sock factory, more people showed up to see it than most of those projects will draw in a full season.
The troll outdrew the ballpark
Thomas Dambo has built 172 of these sculptures around the world, and by his own account they are viewed by roughly 4.5 million people a year. Little Sally, unveiled in a wooded clearing just west of downtown in early November 2025, became North Carolina's seventh Dambo troll and the state now has more of them than anywhere else. She is part of a scavenger hunt built around a fictional Grandmother Tree, with sibling trolls at Dix Park in Raleigh and one in Charlotte. Find the clue Sally holds and you are one step closer to solving it.
She took roughly forty local volunteers about two weeks to assemble out of recycled and found wood. There was no ribbon cutting fund, no naming-rights deal, no purchase agreement in front of City Council. Asked why people respond to his work the way they do, Dambo told public radio it is because his art "is not trying to sell people something." Within seven weeks of her unveiling, more than 31,000 people had made the trip to the corner of West Green Drive and West Grimes Avenue to see her, according to reporting from WUNC and Blue Ridge Public Radio.
Compare that to the numbers the capital projects are working with. City Lake Park's $23 million overhaul was built to draw regional visitation. The new hotel on Elm Street is designed for Furniture Market attendees and business travelers, not for a Tuesday afternoon walk. Smitty and Pearl's is chasing a dinner reservation crowd. Little Sally cost visitors nothing and beat all of it on foot traffic in under two months, without a marketing budget attached to her.
What that says about the pattern
The people running downtown's redevelopment know this. Visit High Point's own president has said it is too early to measure Sally's economic impact on the city, but the visitor number alone already outpaces what several of the ticketed venues see in a comparable stretch. The lesson is not that High Point should stop building hotels and food halls. It is that the thing residents actually turned out for in bulk this year was free, handmade and a little strange, tucked in the woods rather than staged for a photo op on Lindsay Street.
That matters if you live here, because it tells you where the real gathering points are right now, and they are not all in the same place. One cluster is polished and paid for: Congdon Yards, Stock+Grain Assembly food hall, Earl's Landing, Fox & Rocks, all sitting within a few blocks of Truist Point Stadium, whose property line actually runs along Lindsay Street, the same street Smitty and Pearl's is building on. The other cluster is a scrap-wood sculpture with a waiting line that visitors have described, on busy weekends, as wrapping around the block.
A weekend that actually uses both
If you want to see what downtown High Point is right now rather than what it is becoming, the two clusters are close enough to string together in a single Saturday.
- Go find Little Sally first, before the afternoon crowd builds. Park near the wooded lot at West Green Drive and West Grimes Avenue and follow the short path in. Read the clue she holds if you are curious about the Grandmother Tree hunt, and do not climb on her. She is built from reclaimed wood, not engineered for weight.
- From there, head into the Truist Point corridor. If the High Point Rockers are home, check the schedule. The team has had a busy 2026, with pitcher Kent Emanuel named Atlantic League Pitcher of the Week in early August before his contract was picked up by the Cincinnati Reds days later. If you want to combine sports with something charitable, mark September 11 for the sixth annual Climb to Remember at the stadium.
- Eat at Stock+Grain Assembly next door, where the weekly lineup runs trivia, live music and karaoke depending on the night, or walk over to Congdon Yards for Earl's Landing if you want a sit-down dinner built around chef Matt LaRose's locally sourced menu.
- Keep an eye out for Smitty and Pearl's later this year. When the three restaurant concepts and the duckpin bowling arcade open on Lindsay Street, they will sit close enough to the stadium that you could walk from a Rockers game straight into dinner.
The takeaway for anyone paying attention
Downtown High Point is genuinely being rebuilt, and the dollar figures behind that rebuild are real. But if you are trying to understand what actually pulls a crowd here in 2026, the sharpest data point of the year came from something nobody had to buy a ticket for. That is worth knowing whether you are deciding where to spend a Saturday or just trying to read the city's mood correctly. The polished version of downtown is arriving on schedule. The version people already showed up for in the thousands was sitting in the woods the whole time.
If you are weighing what a specific block or neighborhood in High Point is actually like to live near, on a Tuesday as much as a Saturday, that is the kind of question Colleen Long fields regularly from Piedmont Triad buyers and long-time residents alike. Let's Connect — Request Your Free Home Valuation.
