About Mickey Coffee Pot
Long before novelty roadside architecture became a recognized American tradition, two Winston-Salem tinsmiths built an enormous coffee pot beside their shop.
Brothers Julius and Samuel Mickey created the metal advertisement in 1858. The giant pot demonstrated exactly what their business did while making the shop almost impossible to overlook. Estimates put its capacity at roughly 740 gallons, enough for thousands of cups of coffee if anyone had ever been reckless enough to use it that way.
The coffee pot survived long after the original shop disappeared. Changes to streets and development forced it to move more than once, transforming what began as commercial advertising into a city landmark.
Today it stands near the edge of Old Salem, where its age makes the silliness even better. Giant roadside objects feel like a twentieth-century idea, yet Winston-Salem had already installed an absurdly oversized household object before the American Civil War.