Shipwreck Exhibit
FABLED TREASURES
Numerous California Gold Rush-era artifacts from the
SS Central America are being displayed for the first time.
A fter a century and a half on
the ocean floor and decades in
secure storage, dozens of his-
toric California Gold Rush-era
sunken treasures from the 1857 sink-
ing of the fabled “Ship of Gold” (the
SS Central America) are on display at
this year’s World’s Fair of Money®.
The exhibit is jointly hosted by Cali-
fornia Gold Marketing Group, which
owns the items, and Holabird West-
ern Americana Collections, LLC.
“Among the notable, recovered
items are a unique lid to the rem-
nants of the oldest-known Wells
Fargo treasure shipment box; a pair
of the oldest-known Gold Rush-era
sailcloth canvas work pants jeans
that Levi Strauss might have made
in his early years; and jewelry made
from California Gold Rush ‘mother
lode’ native gold in quartz as gem-
stones,” says exhibitor Fred Hola-
bird, president of Holabird Western
▼ RECOVERED ITEMS from the SS Central
America, including (clockwise) the lid from the
oldest-known Wells Fargo treasure box, the earliest-
known Gold Rush-era prospector’s sailcloth
work pants, and the “Mona Lisa of the Deep”
photograph, are on display during show hours.
money.org
THIS 19TH-CENTURY PAINTING
depicts the legendary SS Central
America, which sank in 1857.
Americana Collections. Insured for
$1 million for this display, the jeans
were discovered in a trunk belonging
to passenger John Dement, who sur-
vived the tragedy.
The SS Central America sank to
a depth of 7,200 feet in the Atlantic
Ocean off the North Carolina coast
during a hurricane on September 12,
1857. The vessel was on a voyage
from Panama to New York carrying
tons of California Gold Rush coins,
ingots, and gold dust from San
Francisco and other areas in North-
ern California. The tragedy took the
lives of 425 of the ship’s 578 passen-
gers and crew members, and the loss
of the gold cargo was a major factor
in the economically devastating U.S.
financial Panic of 1857.
Also featured in the display is a
19th-century daguerreotype of an
unidentified woman that the scien-
tific mission recovery team nick-
named “Mona Lisa of the Deep.”
The photograph was discovered
buried in a scattered pile of the
ship’s coal in 2014.
The exhibit also includes a
brass name tag attached to a set
of keys that belonged to the ship’s
purser. “Because these keys are
larger than those used for passen-
gers’ rooms, we think these purs-
er’s keys were for the locked room
where the gold-treasure cargo was
kept,” says Holabird.
O F F I C I A L G U I DE | 20 22 W O R L D' S F A I R O F M O NEY
These objects are among nearly
1,000 from the ship that Dwight
P H OT OS : GE TT Y I M A GE S /F R ANCK-BOSTON ( BACKGR OUND) & CALIFOR NIA GOLD MAR KETING GR OUP
Manley, managing partner of Cal-
ifornia Gold Marketing Group,
consigned to Holabird for auctions
planned later this year. “These in-
credible artifacts that were kept
in secure storage in three different
states since the 1980s are now giving
us a glimpse of daily life for passen-
gers and crew in the 1850s. They are
a time capsule from the California
Gold Rush,” says Manley.
Recovery of what has been de-
scribed as “America’s greatest
treasure” from the undersea site oc-
curred in several stages from 1988 to
1991 and again in 2014. Thousands
of retrieved gold coins and hun-
dreds of gold bars have been sold
since 2000; however, these more re-
cently uncovered items were kept
in storage in three states—Ohio,
Maryland, and Massachusetts—
until a court-approved settlement
was reached, ending a decades-long
ownership dispute.
“Seemingly ordinary items from
the passengers and crew today give
us extraordinary insight into the ev-
eryday lives of the people who trav-
eled on the steamship,” says scien-
tist Bob Evans, who participated in
each of the recovery missions.
These can’t-miss items will be
on display at Table 1926 during
show hours.
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