LISBON FALLS — Antique appraiser Daniel Buck Soules marvels at how new the circa 1897 pair of Levi jeans look today — how completely modern they are, save for a few details.
The familiar leather tag is right there, attached just above the right hip. The familiar silver buttons fasten the top and the fly along the front. And the blue is deep and dark, not faded and largely not creased.
But there are clues to the pants’ real age — more than 119 years old — and ultimately their value.
“I can’t see why these won’t be worth $100,000,” Soules said. “Compared to what other Levi’s jeans have sold for, you are talking about an absolutely pristine, rare, one-of-a-kind 19th-century pair of Levi’s jeans. Where are you going to find another one?”
He’s selling the jeans for the owners, heirs of Solomon Warner, a 19th-century Arizona resident and dry goods store owner.
He’s hoping a museum or even the company steps forward to buy the jeans. He’ll put them up for auction in the spring if no one does, he said.
“They belong in a museum, and that’s where I hope they end up,” he said. “They are a part of America.”
For now, they are rolled up loosely and locked away in the safe in Soules’ Lisbon Falls office.
Levi Strauss owned a San Francisco dry goods store in the 1800s and worked with tailor Jacob Davis to design their first pair of jeans — tough cotton twill pants held together with metal rivets at the seams. They received a patent for their design in 1873.
Soules said Warner paid about $1.25 for a pair in 1897, size 44 waist and 36 length, according to the leather label on the back.
Warner was 80 years old at the time, however, and died before he was able to put them on. They were tucked away in a trunk at his Tuscon, Ariz., home and forgotten about for 119 years.
Soules, a former “Antiques Road Show” appraiser, said he was at an appraising event in Arizona a year ago when Warner’s descendants approached him carrying a rare item, stuffed in a pillow case and wrapped in tissue paper.
“They unrolled it, and all I could think was, why are the showing a me a new pair of jeans?” Soules said.
But then, he looked at the details:
— The pants had one pocket in the back and three in the front, including the tiny change pocket tucked in the top of the right-hand front. Levi Strauss began making its jeans with that little pocket in 1890. The company would not add a second back pocket until 1905.
— They have no belt loops. Instead, the top of the pants are ringed with Levi’s familiar silver buttons designed to attach to suspenders. Belt loops were not added until 1922. The early jeans have a cinch at the back.
“If the owner lost weight, that’s how they’d tighten them up,” Soules said.
But the kicker was the text stamped inside the left front pocket. On modern pants, that stamp reads “For over 140 years, our celebrated high quality denim riveted jeans have been before the public. This is a pair of them.”
The text is almost identical on Warner’s old pair, except instead of “140 years,” it reads “17 years.”
“Levis are a collectors’ item the whole world over,” Soules said. “There are collectors out their eager for this. We are looking at something here that no one else has ever seen.”
And part of what makes the pants so valuable is the company’s own history, he said. Their headquarters was destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, destroying much of their old stock.
“So I don’t think there is an older pair in this kind of shape anywhere on Earth,” he said.
He noted the 1997 sale of a pair found in a Colorado coal mine. Levi Strauss reportedly paid $25,000 for the faded, ripped pants.
“The last pair that sold were from 1893, and they sold for almost $60,000 — and they had been worn,” Soules said. “These absolutely have not.”
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