Once Used as Home Insulation, Antique Jeans Sell for $21,250
A pair of denim pants over 100 years old, found this year tucked into the walls of a Utah home, highlight the Holabird Americana Auction.
Continuing collector fascination with antique denim pants and button-fly jeans from the 1800s mining days of Utah sold for $21,250 at Holabird Western Americana Collections “American Treasures of the Past” auction in late August. Denim clothing highlighted the more than 2,100 lots in a rainbow of collecting categories in the auction, which ended up grossing a healthy $1.3 million.
The Mountaineer brand jeans from ZCMI of Salt Lake City were discovered earlier this year lining the walls as insulation in a Utah home. Two years ago, a pair of Levi’s jeans from the 1880s found in an abandoned mine sold for nearly $90,000 at auction in New Mexico.
A circa 1875-1880 pair of brown canvas standard pants by Neustadter Brothers, a San Francisco-based clothing manufacturer and competitor of Levi Strauss & Co., sold for $16,875 at Holabird. The classic pair of “miner’s” pants were meant for tough outdoor use. Meanwhile, a pair of A.B. Elfelt & Company Pioneer brand brown canvas pants with full label and buckle intact, plain buttons and blue wool factory lining, in nice condition, gaveled for $10,000.
Not all the clothing sold at the event were pants. A men’s denim jacket with no manufacturer’s label and with four of the five buttonholes hand-stitched hit $6,250.
The top lot ZCMI jeans were of particular interest for bidders for many reasons. Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) was founded in 1868 by Brigham Young and community and business leaders in Salt Lake City. Known as the “People’s Store,” ZCMI is considered one of America’s First Department Store.
To combat the inevitable change that territorial growth would bring with the coming railroad, Young and others formed an organization of community-owned merchandising dedicated to the support of home manufacturing and to sell goods “as low as they can possibly be sold, and let the profits be divided among the people at large.”
This organization was christened “Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution,” and although ZCMI was never a true cooperative, it spawned a region-wide system of local cooperatives owned and operated by the people. Sales totaled over $1.25 million in the first year. The store sold a wide variety of goods, including clothing, wagons, machinery, sewing machines, and carpets—all available to member cooperatives at the same price as in Salt Lake City.
Opening in 1870, the “Big Boot,” as the shoe factory was often called, soon manufactured 83,000 pairs of boots and shoes yearly. Two years after the opening of the shoe factory, ZCMI began production of its own line of work clothes in a new clothing factory, soon to be famous for its “Mountaineer” overalls.
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