Appalachian History

Coin collectors today consider the hobo nickel a numismatic treasure, a tribute to long- forgotten folk artists who often literally carved for their supper. The Buffalo nickel debuted in 1913, but it wasn’t until the Great Depression struck that hobo nickel carving reached its peak. During this period, buffalo nickels were the most common nickels in circulation.

The sudden scarcity of jobs in the early 1930s forced a huge number of men to hit the road. Certainly some coins were carved to fill the idle hours. More importantly, a 'knight of the road,' with no regular source of income, could take one of these plentiful coins and turn it into a folk art piece, which could in turn be sold or traded for small favors such as a meal or shelter for a night.

The nickel was an ideal coin from which to fashion such a token. The large profile of the Indian on one side and the classic image of the very wide American bison that complemented it on the reverse side provided an adequately sized canvas for the wandering hobo artist to use. It was portable, and the nickel (a copper-nickel alloy) is the hardest U.S. coin in circulation, ideal for carving.

In a community of generally anonymous drifters, two carvers rose to prominence among hobo nickel creators. Bertram 'Bert' Wiegand was born in 1880 and carved from 1913 to 1949. He signed his coins by removing L I and Y from L I B E R T Y, leaving only B E R T. He tutored the man coin collectors consider the giant of hobo nickel carving: George Washington 'Bo' Hughes (born between 1895 and 1900 in Theo, Mississippi). Bert met the young teenager in a jungle, or hobo camp, along the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio railroad line, and Bo’s first nickels appeared two years later, in 1915. Bo carved till about 1980, when he was last seen by his friend of 40 years, Williard Chisolm, in a Florida camp.

Life as a hobo took its toll: the rigorous manual labor Bo undertook to survive during the money-tight, poverty-ridden 30s rendered his hands stiff and permanently damaged. Frequent beatings by ruthless detectives prowling railroads (where many hobos resided) in search of freeloaders and thieves compounded his dexterity impairment.

Nevertheless, devoted to his craft, Bo worked through the pain and frustrating impediments throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, but in 1957, while he was working on a nickel, his chisel suddenly slipped and struck his hand. The injury forced the once-great hobo nickel engraver to resort to a haphazard punching method. Bo continued his work, but with less frequency and diminished quality, and as America moved into the post-war era genuine hobo nickels became a thing of the past.

The U.S. Mint ceased striking Buffalo nickels in 1938.

Related posts: Riding the Rails

sources: http://www.hobonickels.org/scraps19.htm
www.pcgs.com/articles/article2766.chtml
www.montgomerycoinclub.org/bulletins/2006/club_mccc200607.html


appalachia appalachian+mountains appalachian+mountains+history Bert+and+Bo Bert+Wiegand Bo+Hughes Hobo+Nickels

It probably started out as All-ee, all-ee, outs in free, a call from the person who was it letting those hiding children (the outs) know it was safe to come back to base in the children's game of hide-and-seek. The phrase can also be used to coordinate hidden players in the game kick the can, where a group of children hide within a given radius and a seeker is left to guard a can filled with rocks.

If the core phrase is All outs in free, the -ee is added, and the all is repeated, for audibility and rhythm. Another approach: in Britain, it was common for the town crier to pre-phrase a declaration with All Ye, All ye meaning that all the citizens of the town needed to be aware of the information the crier was about to state, and early Scots-Irish immigrants to Appalachia would have brought that phrase with them.

"When I was growing up in the American South," says Charles Wilson in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,"we actually said, 'All ye all ye outs in free' when playing hide-and-seek (although we called it 'hide-and-go-seek)." Regional variations include:

Ollie Ollie in come free,
Ollie Ollie oxenfreed,
Ollie ollie in come free-o
Ollie ollie oxen free
Ollie ollie oxen free-o
Oly Oly oxen free,
Oly Oly ocean free,
Alley Alley oats in free,
All-ye All-ye outs in free
Ole Ole Olsen free (more common in areas settled by Scandinavians)
Ole Ole Olsen free-o

Children's sayings were hardly recorded until the 1950s, and they are very variable. That's because they’ve been passed down orally from one generation to the next, with no adult intervention or correction. But one educated guess is that the phrase's root is an English-Norman French-Dutch/German concoction: "Alles, Alles, in kommen frei" or "Alle, alle auch sind frei" (literally, "Everyone, everyone also is free")or "Oyez, oyez, in kommen frei!"

"Allez, allez" was a Norman addition to the English language, pronounced "ollie, ollie" and sometimes written "oyez, oyez" and meaning "everyone."

The game hide-and-seek is at least four centuries old, and it seems that the call phrase discussed here was in common use by the 1920s, and probably earlier (‘home free’ is found in print in the 1890s).


sources: http://snipurl.com/3octq [songfacts.com]
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, by Richard Pillsbury, Charles Reagan Wilson, Ann J. Abadie, University of North Carolina Press, 2006
Words to the Wise, by Michael Sheehan
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-oll1.htm
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19970422



ollie+ollie+in+come+free childrens+games appalachia appalachian+mountains appalachian+mountains+history