The oldest known pair of jeans in the world, a pair of labor pants discovered from an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, sold for $114,000 at auction.
According to Holabird Western American Collections, the white, heavy-duty miner’s pants with a five-button fly were one of 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a combined total of about $1 million in Nevada.
The first pair of pants officially produced by San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. in 1873 is 16 years earlier than the current pair. Some claim that historical evidence points to Strauss, a wealthy dry goods dealer at the time, and that the trousers may be an extremely early prototype for what would later become the recognizable jeans.
Any assertions regarding their origin, however, are only “speculation,” according to Tracey Panek, the organization’s historian and archive director.
“The pants are not Levi’s nor do I believe they are miner’s work plans,” she wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
On September 12, 1857, the SS Central America was sunk by a hurricane while carrying a large number of people who had left San Francisco and were making their way through Panama to New York. Furthermore, there is no evidence that older work pants from the time of the Gold Rush exist.
The artifacts’ owner and auctioneer, the California Gold Marketing Group, said of the miner’s trousers “those miner’s jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history.”
The purser’s keys to the treasure room, which held tons of Gold Rush coins and ingots, were among the other things up for auction that had been buried in the ship’s wreckage for more than a century and were located 7,200 feet (2,195 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic. Cost of sale: $103,200
Since shipwreck recovery operations got underway in 1988, gold valued at tens of millions of dollars has been sold. However, this was the first time any artifacts had ever been put up for auction. In February, there will be yet another auction.
According to Fred Holabird, owner of the auction house, “there has never been anything like the scope of these recovered artefacts, which represented a time capsule of daily life during the Gold Rush.”