Hobo symbols
The chalk marks American tramps and hobos were said to leave on fences and gateposts, what each was reported to mean, and what the record shows about how widely they were used.
Test yourself: Hobo symbols quiz
Signs about a house
- Kind woman lives hereA cat drawn in chalk, reported to mean that a kind-hearted woman lived in the house.
- Food given hereA circle with a cross inside, reported in 1907 to mean that food was given at the house.
- Religious talk for a mealA plain cross, reported to mean that a hobo who listened to, or gave, a religious talk would be fed.
- Care if you are sickA letter V, reported to mean that the people of the house would care for a hobo who was sick.
- Gentleman lives hereA top hat, reported to mean that a rich man, or a gentleman, lived in the house.
- Dog hereTwo letter W’s run together, reported to mean that a dog lived at the house; other marks warned of a dangerous dog.
- Keep quietA diamond, or two diamonds touching, reported to mean keep quiet.
- Judge lives hereA spiral, reported to mean that a judge or magistrate lived at the house; a spiral in a circle was the court house.
Signs about the road
- Leave quicklyA circle crossed by two arrows, reported to mean that a hobo should leave town quickly, usually because the police were looking.
- Nothing doingA loosely drawn circle, reported to mean “nothing doing”: no use trying here or going this way.
- DangerA rectangle with a dot in the middle, reported to mean danger, often a dangerous man.
- Camp hereA box open at the top, reported to mean that it was all right to camp at the place.
About hobo symbols
Hobo signs are the chalk marks American tramps and hobos were said to leave on fences, gateposts and water tanks, telling those who came after what kind of welcome to expect. A cat for a kind woman, a top hat for a rich man, two W’s for a dog: the signs here are the best documented, each reported in at least two independent sources. Whether hobos really used them is a question historians still argue, and every page says what the record shows.
Where the signs come from
Newspapers were printing stories of tramp signs by the 1870s, first about Europe, the Historic Graffiti Society found. In 1899 the Topeka State Journal noted “a great many peculiar chalk marks” along the Rock Island tracks, “said to be tramp signs”. A Boston article printed in 1908 taught householders to read them, on the word of a police inspector. Dan Beard printed many of them in 1918 for Boy Scouts, and the hobo writer A-No. 1 (Leon Ray Livingston) explained and systematised the code in his books from 1911, 99% Invisible notes. American Heritage described the custom in 1976 as chalking crude symbols so that later travellers “could tell at a glance what sort of reception they could expect”, and the National Cryptologic Museum shows a sheet of them today, though it says the signs’ origin is “lost to history”.
The doubters
Josiah Flynt, who travelled as a tramp to study tramps, called the signs “a fabrication so far as the majority of roadsters are concerned” in 1900, though he allowed that a few groups had “a crude system of marking ‘good’ houses”. The Historic Graffiti Society has read more than 50 hobo autobiographies without finding one that describes a hobo arriving in town and consulting signs, and among more than 1,000 hobo marks it has recorded it has never found one. It thinks a few simple signs may have been used by a small minority, and that news really travelled by word of mouth. The other side has an answer: the signs were meant to be subtle and the chalk temporary, so their disappearance proves little.
What does survive
Hobos certainly wrote their names. Flynt found tramps’ names “registered” on water tanks in the 1890s, and the moniker page follows one, A-No. 1’s, to a bridge on the Los Angeles River in 1914.
Hobos today
The second weekend of August, hobos from across the country still meet in Britt, Iowa, for the National Hobo Convention, and the National Hobo Museum there, run by the Britt Hobo Days Association, keeps the history of the American hobo.
Sources
- Hobo Signs: Code of the Road?, 2 February 2020, updated 12 February 2022, The Historic Graffiti Society
- Local notes, The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, Kan.), 22 June 1899, page 8, Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- Signs of Tramp World: How They Chalk Upon Fences Advice to Their Fellow-Hobos, syndicated from Boston; Dakota Farmers’ Leader (Canton, S.D.), 13 March 1908, page 6, Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- The American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols, Dan Beard, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1918 (Cornell scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, Preface
- Unpacking Hobo Codes: The Pictographic Language of Train-Hopping Nomads, 99% Invisible, Somewhere Between Myth and Reality
- Hobo Signs, American Heritage, vol. 27, no. 5 (August 1976), American Heritage
- Hobo Communications: A Brief History of Hobos and Their Signs, National Cryptologic Museum exhibit, 4 August 2021, National Security Agency
- Notes of an Itinerant Policeman, Josiah Flynt, L. C. Page, Boston, 1900, Project Gutenberg, ch. II
- Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life, Josiah Flynt, Century Co., New York, 1899, Project Gutenberg, Part II, ch. I
- Hobo Days, City of Britt, Iowa
- National Hobo Museum, City of Britt, Iowa
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research