Raymond Coins

1904 - 1998

From the time he was a young man, Willie Raymond Coins had what he considered to be prophetic dreams, but he did not reveal them for many years. He was born on a farm in southern Virginia, the descendant of a long line of poor, white, subsistence mountain farmers. At age ten, he moved to North Carolina where he became a farmer and tobacco worker. In 1950, he bought his own farm where he lived with his wife and children. After he retired, he began carving river stones, inspired by ancient artefacts found in the area. His first pieces imitated Native American arrowheads, but eventually he would carve whatever was suggested to him by the shape of a stone or piece of wood. Using chisels, knives and a sander, he would produce the forms of animals, angels, people and his famous “baby doll” carvings. Some of his works are life-size renderings weighing as much as 1,500 lb./700 kg. A deeply religious man, Coins believed that his dreams contained divine guidance and he began to record them in bas relief carvings, using scale to emphasize the relative importance of the figures he portrayed.  Coins stopped carving in 1990 through advanced age and lack of inspiration. In 1995 he received a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award for his work. ¹