Mickey Coffee Pot

For people not familiar with Winston- Salem's history, here's an introduction to one of its oldest and most cherished symbols — a large coffee pot.

Not the Biggest, But the Best Known

First off, ours isn't the largest coffee pot in the country. The largest is the Bedford Coffee Pot in Bedford, Pennsylvania, built by David Berton Koontz in 1927 along the historic Lincoln Highway to lure motorists off the road for food, gas, and coffee. At 18 feet tall, 22 feet wide, it could hold roughly 800,000 cups of coffee — it's a whopper. It fell into serious disrepair in the 1990s before being restored and relocated to the entrance of the county fairgrounds, where it's now visible only during select fairground events.

Winston-Salem's coffee pot is a fraction of that size: 7 feet 3 inches from base to cap, 27 inches in diameter at the top, 64 inches at the bottom, with a theoretical capacity of 11,840 cups of coffee. But what it lacks in scale, it makes up for in age and history. 

An Advertisement, Not a Kitchen Appliance

Our coffee pot’s origin has absolutely nothing to do with coffee. Our story begins with one man: Julius Edward Mickey, born in Salem on April 18, 1832. After attending the Salem Boys School, he apprenticed with the town potter — a trade that would set him up for a life in the tinsmithing business, although not in tinsmithing itself.

In early 1858, Julius bought a lot at the southwest corner of Main and Belews Creek Street and  purchased the old Salem Odd Fellows Hall from Salem Square and had it physically moved to his new property for use as a business building. Then he and his brother ran a combined general merchandise, clothing, and grocery-and-meat business out of the building, while Julius's wife, Maria Lavania Vogler Mickey, operated a hattery and notions shop out of the same building.

During that same year, the brothers added tinsmithing to the business, even though neither of them was a trained tinsmith. To draw attention to the new tinsmithing side of the business, Julius had an enormous tin coffee pot built by master tinsmiths the brothers employed and then erected on the sidewalk outside the business. The pot was pure marketing; it was to advertise a trade they managed rather than practiced themselves. Over time, the underlying business drifted even further from tinsmithing — evolving into a retail beef, hide, and fur operation.

A Century of Changing Hands

The pot has outlasted every business it's ever advertised but through it all it has always been known as the Mickey Coffee Pot.

 In 1882, the Mickeys sold the tin shop to George A. Boozer, who sold it again in February 1885 to the firm of Fries, Giersh & Senseman. H.A. Giersh continued operating their general store further south on Main Street while W.O. Senseman took over the tin shop.

In the summer of 1890, W.F. Shaffner bought into J.A. Vance's iron works next door, and Vance & Shaffner absorbed the old tin shop into their operation. Less than a year later, they sold off the plumbing side of the business to L.B. Brickenstein, who ran one of the largest plumbing operations in North Carolina from that spot for many years. He left his own mark on the pot by painting his company logo on it.

In 1924, the Vogler family, whose funeral home sat just across Belews Street, bought the property outright and leased it out to a succession of tenants over the following decades. The last of these was the Sam E. Beck Company, plumbing and heating contractors, who moved in in 1939 and stayed until the site was condemned and destroyed for highway construction in the 1950s.

Storm, Damage, and a Fight to Survive

The pot's early life on the street corner was rougher than its current dignified status suggests. In late 1919, a storm blew it over and it lay in the gutter long enough that there was serious talk of hauling it to the junkyard. Then, Henry Fries, a local businessman intervened, urging that the pot be saved  The following spring it was re-erected on a sturdier base and, for some unknown reason,  it was painted red.

That wasn't the pot’s last close call. Sitting right at the curb, it was a magnet for accidents. For years it was struck by horse-drawn wagons. In 1920, a horse and buggy traveling at a high speed knocked the pot over, almost hitting a woman and child. This incident, along with the pot being in violation of sign ordinances, gave strength to the voices of those who opposed the pots restoration to its former location. The pot was stored behind the business for a time,until  Henry Fries and Bishop Edward Rondthaler spoke up and argued for the symbolic significance of the coffee pot. Ultimately, the town aldermen allowed it to be relocated but required that it be placed further away from the street.

Folklore

Any landmark that survives 165-plus years accumulates folklore, and the Mickey Coffee Pot is no exception. Among the stories were:

A Union soldier hid inside it.

• • A Confederate deserter hid inside it.

  • Salem residents hid their valuables in it when Colonel Palmer's Union troops arrived in 1865.

  • Coffee was brewed inside it each Easter to serve crowds gathered for the Sunrise Service.

  • Boys used to climb in through a trap door and light a fire to send steam whistling out the spout during Christmas and Easter Lovefeasts.

  • When General Stoneman marched his federal troops through Salem in 1865, the people of Salem met the soldiers at the town limits and brought them to the Mickey Coffee Pot, where they served them hot coffee.

Although none of these stories have ever been substantiated, two stories are documented facts.

• • On Halloween of 1930, a group of 18 boys, including Paul and Charles Mickey and Agnew and Fred Bahnson, obtained a stick of dynamite, wrapped it with paper to ensure a maximum explosion, and inserted it into the coffee pot. Fortunately the pot was not blown up, it simply split along a seam. The gang had unwisely used paper with their names on it around the dynamite, so the police were able to quickly solve the crime. Each boy was fined $3 for repairing the coffee pot. 

  • In the fall of 1975, when the Russian basketball team visited Winston-Salem, they were given miniature versions of The Mickey Coffee Pot as mementos of their visit.

A Dividing Line Between Salem and Winston

Beyond advertising and folklore, the pot took on a quieter, more serious role for decades: it marked a boundary. Until 1948, students at Salem College had to sign out before venturing north past the coffee pot, since it stood at the informal line separating the conservative, tightly governed, communal Moravian town of Salem from the bustling, secular, and industrial town of Winston. 

Almost Lost Forever

By the late 1940s, the pot's survival was in doubt. In 1947, the Vogler family announced plans to donate the old tin shop property to the local Masonic Lodge for a new temple but, within months, planning began for a new East-West Expressway that would cut straight through the site and Belews Street itself, so the Masons decided to build the lodge on Miller Street.

The threat didn't disappear with that reprieve. In September 1953, the first East-West Expressway (now Salem Parkway) route map was released, and it included the entire area surrounding the coffee pot. The properties were condemned, and clearing began in earnest. 

Sam Beck moved his plumbing business to Haled Street on the south side, and shortly afterward, both Mickey's old shop and the Salem City Flats, the Twin City's first row of townhouses that were built in 1886 just across the street, were demolished. It certainly looked like the coffee pot's existence would end along with the buildings around it.

Construction of the expressway began on December 21, 1954, but at the same time, a separate road project, the Salem Bypass, was under construction to pull rush-hour traffic off Main Street since Old Salem was beginning to develop as a historic district. That project turned out to be the pot's salvation. James A. Gray proposed relocating the pot to a newly created grassy island at the intersection of Main Street, Brookstown Avenue, and the new bypass. 

Move to Current Location

The bypass opened with a ceremony on Thursday, August 21, 1958, and, on January 14, 1959, city workers loaded the pot onto a wooden sled they had constructed. The next day a city truck dragged it two blocks south to the grassy island, where it was remounted on the base it still occupies. There was talk at the time of eventually moving it back closer to its original site but that never happened. In 1960, the city's board of aldermen formally renamed the bypass Old Salem Road.

Current Location on Google Maps: From the pot’s current location, the original location was north, up S. Main Street to the middle of Salem Parkway overpass.  Salem Parkway follows the path of the old Bellows Creek Street. 

Recognition

At 3:00 p.m. on March 14, 1976, the Wachovia Historical Society mounted a commemorative plaque on the pot's supporting post. Frank Albright, then director of the Winston-Salem Museum, marked the moment by blowing a conch shell as the plaque was affixed. A modified conch shell was historically used as a horn by Salem's night watchman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the sounding of the conch shell echoed the town's watchman tradition. Dr. Edwin Stockton, Jr., president of the Wachovia Historical Society at the time, read letters from President Gerald Ford and Winston-Salem Mayor Franklin Shirley to a crowd of about seventy people. 

The ceremony marked a formal recognition of Mickey Coffee Pot as a landmark, after it had been an informal one for well over a century.

Repairs

Around 1990, the coffee pot had started to lean to the side on its support post and needed repair, but it was unclear who was responsible for the repair. It was determined that, since the city was responsible for moving and erecting the coffee pot at its present location in a public right-of-way, the city was the owner. City carpenters opened the coffee pot from the bottom and found the wooden support structure had deteriorated and was causing the pot to lean so they entered the interior of the pot and reinforced the structure. 

Today

Today the coffee pot (now classified as a sculpture) still stands on its grassy island, hemmed in by heavily trafficked streets, a small tin advertisement for a tinsmithing trade nobody in its founding family practiced. It has outlived the tin shop, the plumbing companies, the Vogler Funeral home across the street, the Salem City Flats, and the boundary it once marked between two towns that are now one. What's left is simply the pot — older than nearly everything around it and still doing the one job it was built for over 165 years ago: making people stop and look.