Visit

Accessibility

OnlyTheHobo is a static educational museum. This page records what we do for keyboard, screen-reader, and low-vision access—and what we intentionally skip.

What works today

• Skip to content on every page (first focusable link).
• Skip to room summary — on exhibit pages, a second skip link jumps to the lead/deck paragraph (id room-summary), injected by js/nav.js.
• Main landmark — id="main" wraps primary content.
• Image alt text — content photographs carry descriptive alts audited this pass; brand logos keep short identifying alts. Captions remain the rights/credit record.
• Glossary deep-links — terms use stable #glossary-* ids (see Search PR when merged).

Audio narration — skipped

We are not shipping room audio in this release. Doing it well would require sourced scripts read by a human or clearly labeled synthetic speech tied to verified text—not fabricated storytelling. Until that exists, use the written room summaries below (and each page’s lead) as the accessible short form.

Room summaries (short form)

Each entry is taken from the page lead/deck already published on the room—useful as a quick outline or screen-reader preview list.

Listed rooms are those with a p.lead summary on the current main branch. After open room PRs merge (e.g. CCC), regenerate this list or open a follow-up.

• Art and trade — Ethics lived in habits. Art lived in objects you could hold. American hobo culture left durable things: carved nickels, chip-carved wood called tramp art, chalk and paint monikers on steel, and the printed covers of radical songbooks. This chapter gathers those arts with names, methods, and sources—and separates legend…
• Black travelers and Jim Crow — Still asking who rode: women were erased by assumption; Black travelers were hunted by statute. Race shaped who could ride where—and what happened after arrest. This chapter places Black riders in hobo history without softening the South’s vagrancy regime, insists that Scottsboro began on a freight, and follows rails n…
• The boxcar kids — The tour meets Depression-era teenagers here in the People wing—before the later Great Depression room widens the crash to national scale and the Federal Transient Service. This chapter stays with the riders themselves: who they were, why they left, how they lived and died on the road, how Hollywood and New Deal progra…
• Britt today — The previous room stayed with coffee-can crowns and the living roster of kings and queens. This chapter is what the festival leaves behind when the tents come down: the National Hobo Museum in the old Chief Theater, the Queen’s Garden across the street, a jungle boxcar a block off Main, and a cemetery section where rid…
• Bulls, yards, and the cost of the road — The Road was not only motion and stew. It was private property under steam, policed by railroad police and special agents— bulls —and measured in official casualty lists that counted unauthorized people on the right-of-way by the thousands. This room stays with yards, enforcement, and the bodily cost of that era. It do…
• Tourist Union No. 63 and Britt, Iowa — Movements and Hard Times closed on Hobo College’s chalkboards and Depression freights. This last wing turns to a town that said yes. Britt made the hobo a guest of honor. The convention is folklore and civic fact at once—a wry “tourist” union born in a boxcar, a 1900 publicity gamble that actually drew riders, a Depres…
• The Great Depression — Hobo College tried to teach the migratory worker on Chicago’s stem. After 1929 the lesson ran the other way: the crash made freights, jungles, and road slang suddenly belong to a much larger America. The Great Depression was not only a stock-market story. It was an everyday catastrophe—jobs gone, banks closed, farms lo…
• Hobo, tramp, and bum — What separated a hobo from a tramp or a bum ? This chapter is the museum’s definitive answer—as historical actors framed it. It attributes the classic formula carefully, follows Nels Anderson’s fuller typology, then turns to the society that sorted bodies with tramp scares, vagrancy statutes, Coxey’s Army, reformers, p…
• The hobo ethical code — Slang named the world. Ethics tried to govern it. A widely reprinted “Hobo Ethical Code” promises self-rule, work, clean jungles, decency to townspeople, and help for runaways. The list is real as living heritage. Its neat origin story—Tourist Union No. 63 at an 1889 St. Louis convention—is harder to pin to a primary a…
• Exhibit map — Walk the building from above. Ink lines on parchment—five wings around a lobby—matching the route you follow with Previous / Next at the bottom of each room.
• Glossary of the road — The men and women who rode the freights built a working language of their own. It named the people they met, the places they slept, the ways they boarded a train, and the ways they found a meal. This glossary comes first so that the rest of the museum can use those words plainly, the way the travelers themselves did.
• Hobo College — Wobblies organized on freights. Another tradition built classrooms on the main stem . Self-help took institutional form: James Eads How’s International Brotherhood Welfare Association, Ben Reitman’s Chicago college, the monthly Hobo News , and winter halls where migratory workers heard economics and law beside first ai…
• Hobohemia and the main stem — Harvest circuits ended in cities. Every large American rail town grew a strip where migratory workers found cheap beds, cheap food, cheap drink, employment agencies, missions, and each other. Riders called it the main stem . Chicago’s was the most famous—and the best documented. This room maps Hobohemia as urban geogra…
• A Museum of American Hobo Culture — Start anywhere, or follow Next room through the whole museum. Legends are labeled as legends.
• The IWW and the rails — Craft unions often ignored the seasonal and migratory worker. The Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905, claimed him. Freights carried organizers to free-speech fights and harvest belts; after 1915, boxcars themselves became recruiting rooms. This chapter follows the Wobbly rail strategy from the …
• Jungle camp & mulligan stew — Life on the rails named the jungle beside bulls and freights. This room stays there. Trackside camps—where riders gathered between freights and flops—are American heritage: where they sat, how etiquette kept them open, what a shared mulligan meant, and how foodways looked when a camera stopped by. It is not a camping g…
• Kings and queens of the road — The previous room traced how Tourist Union No. 63 and Britt’s 1900 yes became an annual National Hobo Convention. This room stays with the crowns. Who is Hobo King or Queen? How does a crowd decide? What did Maurice “Steam Train Maury” Graham do with five reigns and a Grand Patriarch title? Which other names are pinned…
• Language and slang — Monikers were written identity. Slang was spoken tool and password. This chapter is not a second glossary—it shows why a working-road argot grew, who wrote it down, and how word families sounded in sentences. Definitions stay consistent with the full Glossary of the road ; open those anchors when you want the short for…
• Life on the rails — Labels sorted people. Practice kept them alive—or failed to. This chapter follows the freight world of roughly the 1880s through the 1930s as memoir, photograph, and railroad statistics record it: cars and camps, bulls and shacks , hunger and official death counts. It describes that history without teaching anyone how …
• Moniker wall — The last room separated tourist “code” charts from real marks. This chapter gathers what is solid: monikers as identity, date, and direction—names earned in camp, carved on water tanks, chalked on steel—and how Britt still crowns people by those names. Fake pictogram charts stay in the gift shop; see Signs and symbols …
• Music and literature — Carved nickels fit a pocket. So did a songbook. Songs carried news, jokes, and organizing; literature carried the road into parlors; one Depression-era composer turned jungles and freights into microtonal speech-music. This chapter keeps the music and the reading list together—sands the authorship myths—and brings Harr…
• Notable figures — The Road wing mapped how people moved and worked. This wing asks who they were. Some names entered the archive as writers and organizers; others as composites or legends. This chapter favors verified freighthopping, labels fiction as fiction, and ends where most of the road always was: with the anonymous majority. Memo…
• On screen — Songbooks and memoirs were one archive. Film and television were another—louder, stickier, and less careful with evidence. Genre labels matter: a silent-comedy tramp is not a documented migratory worker; satire is not a census; pulp adventure is not oral history. This chapter names verified titles that shaped the popul…
• Origins of the American Hobo — The American hobo was not eternal. He appeared at a particular moment, where three things overlapped: a national rail network, a new economy of wage labor, and a run of severe depressions. This chapter follows that story in order, from the end of the Civil War to the crowded hiring halls of Chicago, and it does so with…
• In Their Own Words — Histories of freighthopping lean hard on observers: census clerks, railroad police, novelists looking for color. First-person voices cut that filter. A rider naming a side-door Pullman , a woman doctor jolted awake in a switching yard , an unnamed man on West Madison Street laughing at a vanished stake—these lines carr…
• Reading room — An annotated shelf of memoirs, studies, and archives cited across the museum. Public-domain editions link out; copyrighted books are named for further reading—full citations live on Sources . Short verbatim PD excerpts are gathered in In Their Own Words .
• Signs and symbols — Culture and Code asks how riders marked, spoke, and remembered the road. Pictographic “hobo code” charts are famous; documented monikers and oral tips are better history. This chapter keeps the skepticism central: folklore labeled as folklore, steel and water-tank directories treated as evidence, and the next room rese…
• Then and now — Britt keeps memory under a roof. This last room keeps it honest. The museum documents a culture; it does not teach anyone to board trains. Then was deadly. Now remains illegal and deadly. If the tour ends only in wanting to “ride the rails like the old days,” the walk has failed.
• Timeline — Selected, chapter-linked dates from the rail era’s beginnings through Britt’s living festival. Contested figures are marked as estimates or tradition.
• Trivia and did you know — Short, verified facts drawn from the exhibit rooms. Each points back to a chapter; contested numbers stay labeled as estimates.
• Women on the rails — Still in the People wing: the previous room ended on notable names. This chapter turns to women inside the anonymous majority. They rode for work, health, love, and survival; they dressed as men; they risked violence and morals arrests; they cooked in jungles and slept in missions; and a few were later crowned at Britt…
• Work circuits — The jungle kept men fed between jobs. Catching out was never an end in itself. For the self-called hobo , freights were the unpaid bus between wages. This chapter is about the trades that built the West and filled Midwestern seasons: wheat and threshing, timber, track, ice, fruit and hops, mines and dams—and the employ…

Reporting barriers

Contact the museum at [email protected] with the page URL and what blocked you. We fix structural issues in PRs; we do not collect personal rider identities.

Related: Ethics · Teacher’s guide · Floor plan · Sources