Pennsylvania is home to a nearly century-old, 18-foot giant coffee pot
By Christopher DeRose
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BEDFORD COUNTY, Pennsylvania (KDKA) — A few years ago, KDKA traveled west on the Lincoln Highway to bring you a story about the World’s Largest Teapot in Chester, West Virginia, a roadside attraction from the 1930s that’s still encouraging people to get off the highway and stop along the byway.
But now, we have traveled east down Route 30 and paid a visit to another local landmark that’s the pride of its town. The nearly 100-year-old giant coffee pot in Bedford, Pennsylvania, is “steeped” in history.
Brian Butko, the director of publications at the Heinz History Center, has written several books on the Lincoln Highway and the many interesting roadside attractions that have sprung up alongside it. He said there are several names for these, but he calls them “roadside giants.”
The Lincoln Highway stretched from coast to coast and is considered to be America’s first transcontinental roadway for cars. Butko says that when this coffee pot was built, it was meant to catch your eye as you were driving by so you would stop and spend some money.
“[David] Bert Koontz had a gas station on the West End of Bedford and in 1927 decided to add a café, and that’s when he added the coffee pot,” Butko said. “At the time, there wasn’t actually even an exterior door on the coffee pot. You had to go through his station. What better way to advertise your business then to actually shape the building like what was being sold?”
The coffee pot didn’t just sell coffee and food to passing motorists. Over time, it sold other things.
“Eventually it became a bar, over the years, a pretty well-known local establishment around here,” said John Holbert, one of the board members at the Bedford County Fair, the organization that maintains the Coffee Pot today.
Holbert says that once the larger highways came in and redirected travelers away from the coffee pot, it fell into disrepair both physically and possibly morally.
“I was told at one time that it was what my grandmother would have called, ‘a house of ill repute,” Holbert said, laughing. “I don’t know whether that is true or not, but that’s what I’ve been told.”
True or not, what is factually accurate is that by the late ’90s and early 2000s, something had to be done with the old structure that was falling apart.
That’s when the Bedford County Fair stepped in and in the middle of a snowstorm in 2004, they had the Coffee Pot moved several hundred yards from its old location to where it sits today at the entrance to the county fairgrounds.
Holbert says that once the larger highways came in and redirected travelers away from the coffee pot, it fell into disrepair both physically and possibly morally.
“I was told at one time that it was what my grandmother would have called, ‘a house of ill repute,” Holbert said, laughing. “I don’t know whether that is true or not, but that’s what I’ve been told.”
True or not, what is factually accurate is that by the late ’90s and early 2000s, something had to be done with the old structure that was falling apart.
That’s when the Bedford County Fair stepped in and in the middle of a snowstorm in 2004, they had the Coffee Pot moved several hundred yards from its old location to where it sits today at the entrance to the county fairgrounds.
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