The Wooden Nickel Historical Museum in San Antonio, Texas has the world’s oldest as well as the world’s largest wooden nickels – 13 feet, 4 inches in diameter and weighing 2,500 pounds. Wooden nickels were most commonly issued in the U.S. in the 1930s after the Great Depression. If you still have some old wooden nickels in your piggy bank, then you’re in luck. You can still use them as real currency. Please, sir…can you spare a wooden nickel?
The above picture shows the late owner Herb Hornung, who was also the creator and inventor of both full and single color double sided wooden nickel presses. That’s his secret vault of nickels. Everybody’s got secrets, I guess.
