Pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, work pants that auction officials describe as the oldest known pair of jeans in the world have sold for $114,000.
The white, heavy-duty miner's pants with a five-button fly were among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a total of nearly $1 million in Reno last weekend, according to Holabird Western American Collections.
Regardless of their origin, there’s no denying the pants were made before the S.S. Central America sank in a hurricane on Sept. 12, 1857, packed with passengers who began their journey in San Francisco and were on their way to New York via Panama. And there's no indication older work pants dating to the Gold Rush-era exist.
Most of the passengers aboard the S.S. Central America left San Francisco on another ship — the S.S. Sonora — and sailed to Panama, where they crossed the isthmus by train before boarding the doomed ship. Of those on board when the S.S. Central America went down, 425 died and 153 were saved. Panek said Levi Strauss & Co. and Jacob Davis, a Reno tailor, received a U.S. Patent in May 1873 for “An Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” Months later, she said, the company began manufacturing the famous riveted pants — “Levi's 501 jeans, the first modern blue jean."
Everything had changed — the materials, product availability, manufacturing techniques and market distribution — between 1857 and the time Strauss came out with a rivet-enforced pocket, Holabird said. He said Panek didn't disagree with him.
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