Hobo Nickel Help Please

Nice coin! I don't know much about these coins, but hopefully someone else does!

fun coin...

i find them to be very cool...

i dont own any, but I like them...

Has a suspiciously fresh look about it.

@CoinHunter4:


In the era of the Dust Bowl, many decent men who'd invested their hopes of caring for their wives and children in tilling the land lost their entire investment. Still determined to save their families from destructive forces beyond their control, they "took to the road" in search of family income.

They did not belong "on the road." They belonged at home. They were first called "homeboys," and soon thereafter, "hobos." They took their dignity with them onto the road. Hobos were not drifters, vagrants, tramps, ne'er-do wells,or any other other semblance of a predator. They were home boys down further on their luck than some other Americans.

The roads were long. They faced hours of down-time hiding in freight cars, evenings in networks of hobo camps, trying to make an HONEST buck whenever possible. Wasting time was not their cup of tea.

There's a story of a child who erased a mark left by a hobo on a curbstone. His mother restored it. She knew this was a signal from one hobo to the next that he had been afforded a meal at this address.

These good honest men, down on their luck developed an art form to help earn their keep or reward a benefactor using all they might afford. Offer of a spendable nickel, not a hyped-up piece of garbage as one might expect from a less dignified transactor, upheld the dignity of the transaction in an age when dignity was hard to come by for a hobo. A nickel, a nail, and a desire to preserve their own societal dignity and worth was all they needed. In human terms, hobo nickels are precious.

I think I have one hobo nickel but it's not the nicest I've seen.
Kevin

Often times people will comment on coins that they know nothing about with an air of authority. I teach hobo nickel carving at the ANA summer seminar, am an admin on the facebook hobo nickel group and I am a life member of the Original Hobo nickel society. there is a thriving market for hobo nickels, both modern and contemporary, as witnessed by the recent and current sales of the Chris Dempsey collection.

https://www.ha.com/c/search-results...h-A-K-071316

I would say your nickel is not modern, toning on both side seems to match, cuts do not look fresh, high grade reverse with smoothed date is definitely not something that I've seen a modern carver do. If you go to hobonickels.org you can see where the club has given names to groups of carvings that display similar artistic styles, yours may have been nicknamed. Value? I am bad at placing values on these, but I would not be surprised to see it sell for $200 at the right sale.

Well, that's a good question mate.

@Spence



I license myself to issue an answer couched in pure, unmitigated speculation.

A nickel in the 1930's was nothing to sneeze at. A pound of bread to feed your depression era family cost $0.09. I believe that an important consideration crafting these nickels to a state of added value was the need to maintain the clear identity of the original substrate.

As to the OP's coin, I'm dumb as brick in making a clear call here but it looks genuine to me. That said, I suspect that, had the creator obliterated one bit more of the original substrate, he'd not only have botched his mission but also have rendered it less desirable than it was in original state. As to why "LIBERTY?" On the Buffalo nickel, outside the profile there ain't much else, to play with. If need arose, or even if the novelty of ownership just wore off, the coin needed to be welcome to circulate.

Kevin