Auction officials believe that a pair of white men’s work pants could be the world’s oldest pair of jeans. They have sold for $114,000.
The pants were discovered in a drowned truck in a shipwreck in 1857 located near the coast of North Caroline. The pants are reckoned to belong to a miner, with five-buttons fly.
According to Holabird Western Americana Collections, the jeans were among the 270 Gold Rush-era memorabilia sold for about $ 1 million. The auction was held in Reni, Nevada, as well as online, on December 3.
Dwight Manley, the managing partner of the California Gold Marketing Group who owns these artifacts said, “Those miner’s jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history. There are no earlier five-button fly jeans in existence.”
The artifacts were discovered from the SS Central America, a 280-foot steamer also called the “ship of gold”, which brought passengers to and from Central America to the east coast of the US in the 1850s.
On account of a Category two hurricane, the ship sank in September 1857, taking 425 out of 578 passengers and crew members down with it. Additionally, the ship went down with an estimate of about 21 tonnes of gold coins and artifacts. The shipwreck was discovered in 1988, for the first time after it sank.
The pair of white men’s work pants were found in a trunk belonging to John Derment, a man hailing from Oregon, and the jeans must have been purchased in San Francisco, according to the auction company.
The five-button fly indicates the jeans might be an early manufacturer of men’s work pants sold by Levi Strauss. Auction officials said that the fly is “nearly identical, if not technically identical, to Levis of today, inclusive of the exact style, shape, and size of the buttons themselves”.
Levi Strauss, in 1873, manufactured the first pair of jeans in San Francisco, which is 16 years after the shipwreck that had the trunk with the miner’s pants.
Tracy Panek, the company’s historian, and archive director informed BBC, “there is no connection between Levi Strauss & Co and the Reno auction pants, nor were they miner’s work pants”.
She added, “The pants are not made of denim and were made years before” Levi Strauss launched blue jeans. The button-fly pants were prominently worn by men in the 19th Century.
Two months before this sale, a pair of vintage Levi’s jeans from the 1880s, discovered in an abandoned mineshaft in the western US, was sold at an auction for $76,000 in New Mexico.
A wide range of items and artifacts were auctioned in the SS Central America shipwreck, including passenger receipts, mid-1800s clothing, a brass bell, purchased for $18,000, and a clear-glass ashtray was sold for $1,500, along with cutlery and kitchen items like a double-spouted pitcher and warped cutlery.
The remaining items found in the shipwreck will be auctioned in February 2023.
