A pair of labor pants that bought for $114,000 at an public sale this month after being pulled from an 1857 shipwreck may very well be an early model of Levi Strauss denims, public sale officers mentioned, although a historian for the corporate mentioned that was “hypothesis.”
The Holabird Western Americana Collections public sale on Dec. 3 showcased 270 objects recovered from the S.S. Central America, which had been touring from Panama to New York in September 1857 when it sank in a hurricane with 425 folks aboard.
The wreck was found in 1988 off the coast of South Carolina, and the rights to its treasures, which included thousands of pounds of California gold, have since grow to be the topic of a decades-long authorized battle.
The pants had been present in a trunk belonging to John Dement, a veteran of the Mexican-American Conflict from Oregon. Mr. Dement was a purchaser for his household’s mercantile store, and, throughout enterprise journeys to purchase items, survived many stormy ship journeys, together with the sinking of the S.S. Central America, in line with the auction catalog.
Mr. Dement’s trunk was recovered in 1991, and the objects inside, which included socks, night time shirts and paperback books, had been salvageable as a result of the trunk had little to no oxygen inside.
The trunk’s situation prevented its contents from exhibiting the bacterial degradation and organic consumption seen in objects that had been extra uncovered on the shipwreck, Robert Evans, the chief scientist and historian of the S.S. Central America challenge, mentioned within the public sale catalog.
Contained in the trunk, scientists additionally discovered the work pants, that are product of a thick unknown materials and coated in black and brown stains. It was not clear who made the successful bid for the pants.
Holabird Western Americana Collections mentioned the work pants may very well be affiliated with Levi Strauss as a result of he was a serious vendor of dry items through the Gold Rush and misplaced treasure within the shipwreck. The unlabeled pants have a five-button sample on the fly, and the buttons are “almost equivalent dimension and manufactured model,” additional convincing the sellers that the pants may very well be made by, or for, Strauss, the public sale catalog mentioned.
Mr. Strauss and his affiliate, Jacob Davis, patented the first modern bluejeans in 1873, 16 years after the S.S. Central America sank.
Tracey Panek, a historian and director of the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives, mentioned in an e-mail that linking the pants to Mr. Strauss was speculative.
Ms. Panek, who inspected the pants and different artifacts from the wreckage in particular person, mentioned that whereas she was excited by the invention, she noticed nothing that will hyperlink the pants to Mr. Strauss.
“From the white coloration, lack of suspender buttons, 5 fly buttons as an alternative of 4, and the weird fly design with additional aspect buttonholes, to the non-denim material that may be a a lot lighter weight than material utilized by LS & Co. for its earliest riveted clothes, the Dement trunk pants usually are not typical of the miner’s work pants in our archives,” Ms. Panek mentioned.
Regardless of the origin of the pants, on the time of the shipwreck, they might not have come near the worth of different loot on the S.S. Central America.
Passengers boarded the ship with gold cash and nuggets, which had been collected within the gold mining towns of Northern California through the Gold Rush. California’s enterprise middle on the time was in San Francisco, the place passengers boarded the S.S. Sonora earlier than transferring to the ill-fated S.S. Central America in Panama.
Greater than a century after the ship went down, the treasure hunter Thomas G. Thompson discovered the wreck. He was later accused of not offering proceeds from the haul to the 161 individuals who invested in his search.
A few of the traders sued Mr. Thompson in 2012, and he was ordered to seem in courtroom and disclose the situation of gold recovered from the shipwreck. He fled and have become a fugitive till U.S. marshals arrested him in 2015 at a resort in Florida. He has been in federal jail since 2015.
