Pants Recovered From Shipwreck Sell for $114,000 at Auction

Tracey Panek, a historian and director of the Levi Strauss Co. Archives, said in an email that linking the pants to Mr. Strauss was speculative.

Ms. Panek, who inspected the pants and other artifacts from the wreckage in person, said that while she was excited by the discovery, she saw nothing that would link the pants to Mr. Strauss.

“From the white color, lack of suspender buttons, five fly buttons instead of four, and the unusual fly design with extra side buttonholes, to the non-denim fabric that is a much lighter weight than cloth used by LS Co. for its earliest riveted clothing, the Dement trunk pants are not typical of the miner’s work pants in our archives,” Ms. Panek said.

No matter the origin of the pants, at the time of the shipwreck, they would not have come close to the value of other loot on the S.S. Central America.

Passengers boarded the ship with gold coins and nuggets, which had been collected in the gold mining towns of Northern California during the Gold Rush. California’s business center at the time was in San Francisco, where passengers boarded the S.S. Sonora before transferring to the ill-fated S.S. Central America in Panama.

More than a century after the ship went down, the treasure hunter Thomas G. Thompson found the wreck. He was later accused of not providing proceeds from the haul to the 161 people who invested in his search.

Some of the investors sued Mr. Thompson in 2012, and he was ordered to appear in court and disclose the location of gold recovered from the shipwreck. He fled and became a fugitive until U.S. marshals arrested him in 2015 at a hotel in Florida. He has been in federal prison since 2015.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/us/jeans-shipwreck-auction.html