H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. est. 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

The Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Company’s major new facility, built in 1932. Described at opening as “the Southwest’s finest modern coffee roasting plant” and “one of the largest and finest in the entire South.”

Address

601 Delaware Street, between South Cherry Street and Hoefgen Avenue, at the Southern Pacific tracks, San Antonio, Texas.

Construction

  • Groundbreaking: July 25, 1932
  • Architects: Morris, Nooman, and Wilson (Builders Exchange building; period sources also spell “Noonan”)
  • General contractor: George W. Mitchell Construction (G. W. Mitchell, 313 Builders Exchange building)
  • Size: 14,000 sq ft per floor plate × 2 floors = 28,000 sq ft total (period sources round to “16,000 square feet”)
  • Cost: $130,000
  • Construction type: Two-story, fireproof
  • Target occupancy: October 15, 1932 (revised to November 15; actual occupancy ~November 1932)

Features

  • Modern coffee roasting and vacuum-packing equipment (Huntley Manufacturing Company Monitor roasters were the documented H&H roaster vendor in 1923 and a plausible continuation into the 1932 plant pending direct documentation)
  • 60 or more employees
  • Showers and lounge rooms for both men and women
  • Commodious company cafeteria
  • Garage and workshop for fleet maintenance
  • Special railroad siding arrangement for simultaneous loading/unloading of several freight cars
  • A large H and H Crystalvac container placed on the roof — visible for blocks in all directions

Open House

Wednesday, December 21, 1932, 6:30–10:30 PM

75 Lions Club members attended a luncheon and tour on December 28. Open House broadcast over Station WOAI at 8 PM December 21.

The original hand roaster used by William R. Hoffmann in 1904 — “hardly larger than a 50-pound lard can” — was given a place of honor in the new plant, a tribute to the company’s founding.

Previous location

The company had been at 331 Burnett Street for approximately ten years before this move (so ~1922–1932). Earlier locations: 1223 West Commerce Street (1912), 228 East Commerce Street (Hoffmann’s original business).

Factory finds (non-coffee paper, wood, and metal)

The plant at 601 Delaware is easy to read as a coffee-only story (roaster hardware, keywind tins, newspaper ads), but on a walk-through what comes out of walls and outbuildings still advertises the full brand grid the office wrote up — tea, spices, signage, shipping collateral. These are site-recovered finds, not dealer stock, and they confirm the company’s non-coffee lines as part of the physical plant footprint.

  • Sales report books from the office ceiling — interwar sales-desk ledgers pulled from above the office ceiling during a cable run. Line-by-line entries for tea, house blends, Sam Houston, Broncho, Texas Girl, and the rest of the brand grid. Full write-up under Sales report books from the office ceiling.
  • Master Chef painted plywood sign (in situ) — rough board with large red H AND H slab-serif lettering and MASTER CHEF / COFFEE in black block type. Nail holes and weathering from real use; recovered on the factory footprint, not dealer stock. Figure: assets/images/gallery/factory-master-chef-sign.jpg.
  • H and H price sign (Master Chef, paper) — large unfolded paper counter placard, heavy red ink, never marked for the shelf; picked up in New Braunfels. Same mid-century Master Chef line as the one-pound tins but in printed-paper form, not the field-shot wooden board above. See H and H price sign.
  • Crate fragment with stenciled Delaware Street address — shipping-crate board fragment from a small outbuilding on the property (field notes use the local nickname “murder shed”). Still carries stenciled shipping identity tied to Hoffmann-Hayman and the Delaware Street works — wood-and-ink evidence of the outbound logistics that accompanied burlap, nails, and finished goods leaving the plant.
  • Paprika barrel lid — bulk-format sibling to the small H and H Spices upright tins. Paprika is listed in the published flavor range on H and H Spices; the lid documents the line at grocery scale even though a full barrel pack is not yet in hand. The site-wide Wanted list still calls out a paprika tin for the brand range.

Security fixtures — three in situ

Three security fixtures survive at 601 Delaware, documenting that H&H maintained substantial on-site secure storage — consistent with a 60+ employee plant handling weekly payroll cash, green-coffee purchase settlements, and possibly finished-goods bond collateral:

  1. Small wall safe — Sargent and Greenleaf. A combination wall safe by Sargent and Greenleaf (Rochester, N.Y. — established 1857; the dominant American producer of combination locks and precision vault hardware). A compact office fixture, recessed in the wall, for immediate-access petty cash or daily till.

  2. Walk-in vault — Diebold locking door. A full walk-in vault room with a heavy locking door; the combination dial on the door is marked Diebold (Canton, Ohio — founded 1859; principal American manufacturer of bank vaults and commercial vault doors). The walk-in vault would have held payroll cash ahead of payday, bond documents, and other instruments that required more than a wall safe’s capacity. Whether the vault was in the original 1932 design by Morris, Nooman and Wilson or added later is undocumented.

  3. Full safe on wheels — inside the vault. A free-standing combination safe on casters, housed inside the walk-in vault. This combination of a secured room and a locked safe within it is standard double-security practice for high-value commercial deposits — the wheeled safe could be repositioned or removed if the vault room itself was opened by force.

Together the three fixtures indicate H&H was operating at a cash-handling scale unusual for a regional roaster — consistent with their documented 60+ employees in 1932, a multi-state distribution network, and the capital outlay documented in the plant ($130,000 construction cost).

Current use: The H&H artifact collection is now housed in the walk-in vault. The vault that once secured the company’s payroll and bond documents now holds the tins, jars, signs, and ephemera that document the company’s history.

Old Roaster door and power box

A separately documented in-situ artifact: the cream-enamel door and embossed OLD ROASTER Dymo-style label on the power box for the roasting line — alligator-cracked paint, rust streaks, label intact. Visible proof of roasting infrastructure even when the air on a walk-through reads neutral (humidity, empty shell, time, later construction). Figure: assets/images/gallery/handh-old-roaster-door-ig.jpg. Full write-up: Old Roaster switch at the H and H Coffee Factory.

Building fabric and systems (firsthand walkthrough)

Observations from a 12 June 2026 firsthand walkthrough by curator Brett Elmendorf, recorded in the Nancy and Tim Draves session digest (Rec11 ~14:34–15:07 and ~33:33–35:46). These are first-party but observational/oral, not a measured survey — treat as field notes pending confirmation against the books, the G. P. Menger narrative, and the 1942 wholesale price sheet.

  • Natural-gas main and second-floor roasters. The building’s natural-gas supply enters on a five-inch pipe. Brett estimates four-to-six roasters of roughly 500–600 lb sat on the second floor, fed by that main. The roaster count and capacity are Brett’s estimate and remain an open item — to be confirmed against the books / G. P. narrative / 1942 price-sheet roastery configuration (see Where are the original factory machines?).
  • Structure. Columns and beams in three layers; the infill between columns is hollow brick / CMUs (concrete masonry units, extruded, with multiple generations visible). The infill is non-load-bearing and knockable-out because the structure rests on the beams.
  • Front (office) section. Metal lath and plaster, with a painted / stucco finish.
  • Windows. Steel-sash, roughly 8 ft tall, pivot-hung (L-shape pivots / chains, not cranks). The second-floor glazing is not glass or plastic but a fiberglass-like sheet ≈⅛ inch thick that has never been replaced; some sashes are painted shut. A pre-sale tenant sprayed the second-floor exterior tan, covering original finishes.
  • Marble threshold. A ~2-inch strip of marble flooring survives in the office-entry threshold near the old bathroom, implying lost adjacent flooring.
  • Concrete. The concrete is lime-based, not Portland.
  • No Saltillo tile was found on the property (possibly once on the dock, since removed).

Sanborn fire-insurance coverage (LOC) — checked 2026-06-13

Pulled the Library of Congress digitized San Antonio Sanborn set (the only freely available one): base surveys 1911/1912/1924, “republished 1952” in seven volumes (collection; 601 Delaware sits in Vol 3 — Denver Heights). Per the Vol 3 street index (sheet numbers are continuous across the atlas and map directly to the sheet images):

Street / block Sheet What’s on it
Delaware odd / north frontage (601–633), block 657-south, + Ohio 100–138 269 The H&H plant (601) and the dwellings facing it on Ohio
Delaware even / south frontage (500–618), Louisiana, Florida 271 Industrial row opposite the plant (chemical/wine/repair) + Talley Transfer Co.
Indiana 300-block (300–332), block 657-north 269 Dwellings; vacant corner lot at 300 Indiana
Delaware 300–535 (incl. 533), Hoefgen Av 255 Appliance/tire store (533) + McKesson & Robbins drug warehouse (663)
Cherry S. (100–233) 261 —
Federal Envelope Co. (Iowa/Hoefgen) 254 —

Direct images, e.g. sheet 269: https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd403m:g4034m:g4034sm:g4034sm_g08740195203:08740_03_1952-0269/full/pct:50/0/default.jpg (swap 0269 → 0271, 0255, 0254).

Finding — the LOC plate DOES depict the plant. Vol 3 sheet 269 labels the building by name across its footprint:

HOFFMAN & HAYMAN COFFEE CO. — COFFEE ROASTERS Fireproof Constn. — BUILT 1932 … BUILT 1944 (warehouse additions)

(Note the cartographer’s spelling: “Hoffman & Hayman” — single-n Hoffman. A primary-source variant of the firm name.) The plant occupies the northwest corner of the Ohio→Delaware block at the rail line (addressed 601 at the Delaware/rail corner, 100 on the Ohio side), with the rail right-of-way to the west marked “IMPASSABLE.” Construction notes legible on the plate: concrete first floors & roof (CONC. FR. FLS. & RF.); brick curtain walls except the north wall, which is tile (matches the field observation that the north elevation differs); incinerator on the north; office (OFF) and warehouse (W. HO, 2nd floor) wings — the warehouse bays carry the 1944 build date; chemical extinguishers (CHEM. EXTRS.), fire deck 1st / tile 2nd, V.P. 50%, hose each floor. A 12-inch water pipe runs down Delaware. Figure: assets/images/gallery/sanborn-1952-vol3-sheet269-hh-plant.jpg (full sheet: …sheet269-full.jpg).

Bottle-washing — the “across the street” works. Oral history anchors a real target, corroborated firsthand by the Peché family on the 13 June 2026 tour. Manuel Peché — father of David L. Peché (Arcadia author whose Downtown San Antonio book the project used to identify its first tin) and husband of Mary Louise Peché (101) — washed bottles at a works across the street as a boy (~age 14, c. 1940), then came to H&H, unloading coffee sacks off the rail dock (Mary Louise: “I know that he came to unload the train”) and driving, before being drafted into the Navy ~1944. The family places the bottle works squarely on the even/south Delaware frontage (sheet 271) — but in this republished-1952 plate that block is warehouses and repair shops (chemical/wine warehouse, electric-motor and stove repair, Venetian Blind Factory), with no bottling works labeled. That fits: the works predates the ~1952 state (Manuel’s stint was c. 1940), so it would appear only on an earlier survey or in city directories for the even-600 Delaware addresses (chase routes in the date caveat below).

Immediate neighbors (from the same plate):

  • South, across Delaware (sheet 271, even 500–618 block): a continuous masonry industrial row facing the plant — Chemical Warehouse (CHEM. W.HO, brick/tile, ~500–602), Wine Warehouse (WINE W.HO, brick/tile), Stove & Refrigerator Repair (CONC. FL., addressed 604/606), Electric-Motor Repair (CONC. FR. & FL., C.B. curtain walls, wood rf.), and a Venetian Blind Factory (masonry). Behind them toward Louisiana: Talley Transfer Co. storage warehouses. Figure: assets/images/gallery/sanborn-1952-vol3-sheet271-delaware-south.jpg.
  • North, across Ohio then Indiana (sheet 269, block 657): dwellings on both frontages (Ohio 100–138; Indiana 300–332). The corner lot at 300 Indiana (at the rail line) is vacant; 308 Indiana holds a frame dwelling. Figure: assets/images/gallery/sanborn-1952-vol3-indiana-300block.jpg.

Caveat on date: the LOC Vol 3 base is 1911/1912/1924 “republished 1952”; the plant footprint shown is the 1932 building with 1944 additions, i.e. a late-1940s/early-1950s state. For finer detail of the second-floor machinery layout (vacuum-packing compressor, green-coffee bins, rooftop water tank) — or to find the bottle-washing works that the 1952 plate does not show — the free LOC raster is insufficient. Chase routes, easiest first:

  1. Morrison & Fourmy city directories (UTSA / SAPL Texana) — look up the even 600-block Delaware addresses (600/602/604/606/608/610/616/618) year by year for a “Bottling Works / Bottling Co.” occupant; this dates the works and names the firm without a Sanborn pull. (Checked June 2026: no free true-1930s SA Sanborn is online for this block.)
  2. David L. Peché — partly done (13 June 2026 tour): the family confirmed the across-the-street bottle works and Manuel’s c. 1940 stint but did not name the firm. Worth a follow-up; the Downtown San Antonio book may also describe it.
  3. SAPL ProQuest “Texas Digital Sanborn Maps” (San Antonio library-card login; access path in the SAPL Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps LibGuide, https://guides.mysapl.org/c.php?g=1143589&p=8353969) — pull the earliest Denver Heights / Ohio→Delaware block sheet (pre-1952 survey) and read the south/even Delaware frontage.
  4. UTSA Special Collections holds the physical San Antonio Vol. 3 (Denver Heights) earlier-edition atlases for reading-room consultation.

613 Delaware Street (adjacent parcel)

Wartime classified ads (1944) and Rohde & Gittinger listings (1943–1944) describe a furnished residence adjoining the H & H Coffee Co. plant at 613 Delaware St. — a street number contemporaries used for the factory neighborhood, distinct from the 601 Delaware plant address in fire and operations coverage. Albert Osterloh (night watchman, 613 Delaware, 1936 assault story; 1943 obituary for Albina Osterloh; 1944 Commerce Street injury) and the Jasso family (1974 Woolford column and Francisca Jasso obit at 613 Delaware) document the residential side of the block during and after H&H occupancy. Clips: HH-CLIP-1944-0003, HH-CLIP-1944-0004, HH-CLIP-1943-0008, HH-CLIP-1943-0009, HH-CLIP-1936-0006, HH-CLIP-1944-0005, HH-CLIP-1974-0005, HH-CLIP-1974-0006.

Open questions

  • Why did the first-floor structure require steel I-beam repairs, and what was on the roof that required extra support? Physical observation confirms: visible 45-degree diagonal cracks in the first-floor ceiling (concrete beam soffits) and steel I-beams retrofitted to carry the load that the cracked members can no longer safely sustain. The crack pattern is diagnostic: 45° diagonal tension cracks in RC beams indicate shear failure, not settlement or bending (which produce vertical cracks). Shear cracks initiate near supports or under concentrated loads where shear stress is highest; the concrete splits along the principal tensile-stress plane at ~45°. The I-beam retrofit bypasses the damaged concrete by creating a parallel steel load path. Leading hypotheses for what caused the overloading: (1) Rooftop gravity water-storage tank — a standard 1930s fire-code requirement, typically 10,000–25,000 gallons (80,000–200,000 lbs), easily exceeding the original beam design if added post-construction; (2) Vacuum-packing compressor and cooling plant for the Crystalvac machinery (heavy equipment; vibration from compressors accelerates diagonal cracking); (3) Bulk green-coffee storage bins on the second floor, installed after the building was designed for lighter process loads. The crack-and-retrofit sequence was likely triggered by one of these loads being added after the original 1932 design was finalized. Research angles: San Antonio building permits and repair notices (c.1932–1950); fire-insurance records naming rooftop tank capacity; engineering correspondence if held by George W. Mitchell Construction descendants or archive; Sanborn fire-insurance maps showing second-floor machinery layout; comparison with sibling 1930s Texas roasting plants.
  • Where are the original factory machines? Partially answered (2026-05-25): four Jabez Burns Jubilee roasters were sold to Monterrey (1971; Chris M. Jasso letter via Nancy Draves). The 1904 hand roaster was preserved as a 1932 Open House display piece. Huntley Monitor line (1923 documented) and vacuum-packing / Crystalvac equipment remain unaccounted for. Research angles: CoffeeTec Antiques Roasters listings; auction notices; trade-press used-equipment ads; museum accession files.

  • What did peak-operation interior photography look like? Partially expanded (2026-05-21). Features catalogs the 1932 plant build at occupancy; documented newspaper interior shots from the 1940s–1960s peak-operation period now include: (a) the 22 May 1949 San Antonio Light “$315 Million Output Predicted” McNeel business feature (HH-CLIP-1949-0002), which prints a documentary photograph of about 70 H&H Coffee Co. employees demonstrating quick milling, weighing, and packaging of fine coffees inside the 601 Delaware plant on the occasion of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association annual dinner (held at the plant the Tuesday before, 17 May 1949); and (b) the 1959 “Top Coffee Plant” Light feature on the Hoffmann-Hayman page. The 1949 photo is the earliest documented workforce-line interior shot from the Delaware Street era and the only one taken during the late-G. P. Menger / pre-Continental period. Research angles: San Antonio Light / Express photo morgues (Trinity University archives, UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures); Sanborn fire insurance maps showing machinery layout; private employee snapshots if any surviving worker families can be reached.

  • “G — M — A” surveyor’s pavement marker at the entry gate — whose stamp? A small zinc / galvanized-steel domed pavement marker, the size of a US quarter, is driven into the Delaware Street pavement directly in front of the factory’s entry gate (2024 reference post). The cap face carries a central center-punch dimple, radial tick marks, and three legible stamped letters reading G — M — A around the perimeter — almost certainly a Texas surveying firm’s or registered land surveyor’s initials, but the specific attribution is not yet identified. Research angles: Bexar County plat records and recent surveys filed for the H&H parcel and the Delaware Street right-of-way; Union Pacific / Southern Pacific railroad ROW survey records for the rail siding directly behind the building; City of San Antonio public-works construction-control records (SAWS, TxDOT, City PW); Texas Society of Professional Land Surveyors Alamo Chapter rosters cross-referenced against the GMA initials; a registered surveyor recognizing the cap face in person would likely identify the firm immediately. Open sub-questions: are there matching GMA stampings at the parcel’s other corners (street curb, rear-of-lot at the rail siding, intermediate angle points) that would establish this as a coordinated parcel-corner monumentation rather than a single-point reference?

See also

People

Places

Events

  • 601 Delaware roof fire (25 January 1947)
  • Aviation Coffee Fire (1937) — adjacent-history fire at Tucker successor
  • Burns Jubilee roasters sold to Monterrey
  • Continental Coffee of Chicago acquires Hoffmann-Hayman

Companies

Brands

Stories

Synthesis

  • Plant vs. factory — terminology — KB convention for plant (historical) vs. factory (reuse project)
  • Summerville Photos (1929 and 1936)

Future

Operations

Book

  • Historical Interviews

Sources

  • Bruynzeel Collection Shelving (Sysco®) — product page
  • CoffeeTec — homepage (new & used roasting equipment marketplace)
  • eBay listing — American Can CANCO Model 08 Automatic Can Seamer, 502 diameter tooling (item 123924453162)
  • Melvina Can Machinery — Canco (American Can Co.) Seamer inventory page

Reuse program

Forward-program planning, regulatory pathways, and operational documents for the adaptive reuse of this building live in the sibling repo 601-delaware. That repo holds the roadmap, vision, designation pathway, building systems, programming by area, and the Cultural Factory Thesis identity argument.