Building Description Bedford Coffee Pot, Bedford Pennsylvania
The Bedford Coffee Pot is a round two-story building constructed in 1927 in the shape of an old-fashioned coffee pot. It is located on the south side of Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) just west of the boundaries of the borough of Bedford, Pennsylvania, situated atop a low knoll on the eastern side of the entrance to the Bedford County Fairgrounds. The Coffee Pot has sloping wood-frame walls, approximately nineteen feet in diameter at the base and nineteen feet high, with two concrete appendages shaped to resemble the spout and handle of a coffee pot. Its shallow-sloped overhanging roof also resembles the lid of a coffee pot. The Coffee Pot was moved in December 2003 from its original site along Route 30, approximately 500 feet away, and was restored during the summer of 2004.
The exterior finish material of the Coffee Pot is stucco, painted silver-gray. There is an entrance door into the Coffee Pot on both the first and second floors (the second-floor entrance door is currently accessible only by ladder), and there are two window openings with one-over-one-light double-hung wood windows on both floors. All of the openings are set in wood frames that - because of the inward slope of the exterior wall - project at the top from the face of the building.
Appendages shaped to look like a spout and a handle of an old-fashioned coffee pot are added to the basic structure to further the illusion of the Coffee Pot building. Both are made of a fine-grained cement stucco applied to metal mesh mounted on 2-by-4 wood frames. The roof of the Coffee Pot is round, with a shallow slope and asphalt roofing, and is stepped up in the middle to a central wooden ball to resemble the lid of a real pot. The roof projects beyond the top of the building by eight inches, without a gutter. On the underside of the overhang are ceramic light fixtures, spaced approximately four feet apart all around the building.
The first floor of the Coffee Pot is a single round room, with a ceiling approximately 7'-8" above the finished floor. The floor is concrete, and the lower walls are lined with a wainscot and chair rail. Above the chair rail, the wall is finished with plaster and the ceiling with gypsum board. The second level of the Coffee Pot is also a single round room, with a ceiling about 8'-2" above the floor, its surfaces are unfinished.
Originally, the exterior surface of the Coffee Pot was asphalt roll roofing (or "tar paper"), painted silver gray. In the early 1940s, the building was coated with a half-inch-thick layer of stucco on wire lath, and the stucco was formed and colored to resemble brick. This stucco layer was failing when the Pot was relocated, and in the restoration, it was replaced by a new layer of stucco.
Coffee Pot was originally built with a small kitchen wing on its eastern side, which provided the only access to the interior of the building. That wing was completely reconstructed and enlarged in the eariy 1940s so that it bore no resemblance to the original wing. At the same time, a three-story brick-and-stucco hotel building was constructed behind the Coffee Pot, connected to it through the rebuilt kitchen wing. In 2003, the hotel and the kitchen wing were demolished when the Coffee Pot proper was relocated. In the restoration, a new first-floor entrance doorway was constructed were the doorway between the Pot and its kitchen wing had been located.
