Introducing Long Brim


By Ralph Winter HLM37, Chris Dempsey LM64

The first coin pictured below was Lot 50 in OHNS Auction 21. I was the winning bidder. Recently, while looking through my collection of hobo nickels, Chris Dempsey realized he had one in his collection by the same carver. Chris looked further and found a third match out on the old OHNS website. We struggled with what to name this classic carver as no one feature stuck out. We finally came up with "Long Brim." Each of the subjects is wearing a hat with long brims On the second two examples the brim extends from one edge of the coin to the other. In the first example the brim extends to the coin edge on one side.

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The carving characteristics for "Long Brim" are as follows:

  1. Curved hat brim with pointed ends extending nearly to the edge of the coin (into "L" in LIBERTY on right).
  2. Fancy hat with bow on the hatband.
  3. Examples range from having no ear to poorly defined ear to fairly well defined ear.
  4. Punched hair, beard and eyebrows.
  5. Punched eye.
  6. Profile unaltered.
  7. Double collar and defined shoulder.
  8. LIBERTY remains while dates are partially obliterated.
  9. Field decently dressed; trace of braid on third example.
  10. Average High carving quality.
  11. First example was gold plated.