Huey’s Coffee of Mount Pleasant will mount a vintage Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter or “Huey” — such as this — on the roof of its building. (Contributed Photo)

MOUNT PLEASANT — If strong coffee doesn’t wake you up in the morning, perhaps the sight of a helicopter sitting on top of a coffee shop will.

A homegrown, home-brewed Northeast Texas company is gearing up to open a store in Mount Pleasant that pays tribute to the company’s name: Huey’s Coffee.

A vintage Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, better known as the “Huey,” will be mounted on the roof of the building. It’s the third location for the company, a small startup that is taking off across the region.

Huey’s Coffee’s first store opened in 2022 in Gilmer, and its second opened in Pittsburg in 2023. Another location is under construction in Greenville, and stores are planned for Paris and Marshall in the future, said Will Burrows, the company’s president and a Mount Pleasant native.

Scott Glover, the coffee shop’s owner and founder, also is the founder of Mount Pleasant-based U.S. Roast, which provides coffee for restaurants and cafes across the nation.

He’s also the founder of the famed Mid-America Flight Museum in Mount Pleasant, a nonprofit living history exposition featuring numerous airworthy military aircraft — including a Huey, a U.S. military helicopter that played a pivotal role in the Vietnam War.

The museum’s Huey is where the idea for the coffee shop’s name came from, Burrows said. He and his brother got to know Glover — and started hanging around the museum — when they got involved with U.S. Roast in 2017. The museum acquired an operational Huey around the same time they were coming up with a coffee shop concept. The helicopter’s arrival generated a bit of a buzz.

“We were all just kind of spit-balling ideas, and it was like, ‘Hey, Huey’s kind of has a good ring to it,’” he said. “And that’s what we ended up rolling with, and our entire concept is military aviation-themed.”

The Mount Pleasant coffee shop will be the company’s flagship location. Its building is a roughly 5,000-square-foot structure at 301 W. 16th St. that was home to a Studebaker automobile dealership in the 1930s, Burrows said. Most recently, it was an automotive paint shop. Burrows didn’t say when the store might open.

The coffee shop will include 2,300 square feet of seating space, a drive-thru that can handle between 15 and 18 cars and a commercial kitchen that’ll prepare food for all of the company’s locations, Burrows said.

“It’s going to be a lot different than any other Huey’s that we put out there,” Burrows said.

Aside from the sheer size of the store, the biggest difference will be the helicopter.

The idea of mounting a chopper on the building came from a coffee company in Kansas City, The Roasterie, which has a Douglas DC-3 airplane angled toward the sky atop its shop, Burrows said. That company wanted to pay homage to the role DC-3s have had in hauling coffee beans, according to a story in Simple Flying, an aviation news website.

The Huey that’ll be on top of the Mount Pleasant building isn’t the same one that’s at the museum. The one that patrons will see up on the roof is coming from a seller in the Midwest, Burrows said.

The soon-to-be static shell of a helicopter doesn’t have an engine, transmission or other components, Burrows said. Its propellers will be locked to prevent them from spinning, and the craft will be painted military green. It’s expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

“It was essentially just bound for a scrap yard,” he said. “This one’s going to find its new home. We’re going to give it a facelift, get it all painted up and back to its original glory, and then we will be joisting it and strapping it down for a long life on the roof.”

Burrows said he’s not familiar with the history of the bird. It might have seen military action, but it could have been used for training purposes as well, he said.

Burrows told Mount Pleasant City Council members of the company’s plans during a March 19 meeting. He was there to request a special use permit to install the Huey on the roof. The permit was required because the helicopter is technically a sign for the restaurant, though it doesn’t land within the city’s normal sign regulations.

City leaders were enthusiastic about the news and approved the permit by a unanimous vote.

Huey’s Coffee supports the flight museum, which has a mission of honoring veterans and preserving military aircraft history. To that end, the coffee shop gives veterans a 10% discount on their purchases, Burrows said.

Overall, the company’s goal is provide East Texans with good coffee and give back to the communities in which it operates, he said.

“There’s all kinds of big corporate chains popping up throughout the throughout the state and country,” Burrows said. “Those guys will always have their place, but they cannot compete with a hometown coffee shop.”