A friend of a friend was doing demolition on a house near where I live and there was an old telephone nook built into a wall, small shelf with a connection. They were popluar here in south east Texas. Anyway there is a symbol carved into the wood below the table that we are trying to figure out the meaning of. I’ll post a link to the picture once I figure out how to.
Simply stated it is a crescent like this one. But rotated so it opens downwrd then it has a spike like the nail in this picturesuperimposed over it.
Tell me where to host a picture and I will and then link to it. In the meantime, any ideas?
Crowmanyclouds, the spike or nail is a symbol carved into the wood as a design.
Ethilrist, that is almost exactly it!! So the wood carved symbol is just like this symbolexcept the crescent is rotated 180 degrees so that it is pointing down. It has to be anywhere from 30 to 50 years old.
Epiphone uses a similar symbol on their guitars. It’s a stylized E, but rotated, like when you’re playing the guitar, it looks more like a crescent pointed down. Could have been someone just liked the shape.
If it isn’t the Quake symbol, then it’s probably a Builder’s Mark, which is a kind of signature that the carpenter or mason would leave in their work, usually hidden away.
When I said it was 30 to 50 years old, I was talking abou tthe wood carving, not the Quake symbol. And actually it’s probably closer to 100 years old if it’s as old as the house it’s in.
AskNott, that’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw it but no, not one of those.
I thought about a Shriners emblem because of the downward cusp but nothing had that spike through it. The picture looks oddly familiar but I can’t place it anywhere.
The entire cabinet is a decorative design, it could just be a unique pattern the woodworker created, but at the same time it has the look of something intentionally symbolic.
My thoughts exactly TriPolar. Thought it looked vaguely familiar but that may be due to the Quake icon. I had seen that game years before, maybe even had it.
It does look intentional rather than just a design. Also the shape of the wood molding at the top looks Middle Eastern so I thought about the Shiners as well.
I uploaded the picture to Symbols.com to see if their community has any insight but it doesn’t look like a busy community board.
That’s kind of odd; iconographically, you traditionally display the horseshoe with the points up so that it catches and holds the luck, rather than letting it spill over onto the ground.
