Levi’s Ghost Signs of the West: Where the Painted Walls Are, and What They Say About the Closets Nearby

One of us stood in front of the Jacksonville wall this year. The lettering is worn to a whisper but it still reads: a store name and General Merchandise across the top, Levi Strauss and Co’s across the middle, Copper Riveted around the two-horse mark, Overalls to the right, Strong and Durable at the bottom. It is on a brick wall in the town’s National Historic Landmark district, and Levi Strauss and Co.’s own historian has featured it twice, dating it to the turn of the twentieth century, the years when, in her words, the company began to paint the sides of buildings with its name and slogans all over the West.

Why Levi’s painted walls

The two-horse mark that anchors most of these signs dates to 1886, when the company put an image of two horses failing to pull a pair of waist overalls apart on its leather patch and in its advertising. Its patent on riveted pockets was about to expire, competitors were coming, and the picture communicated strength to customers who could not read English. The product line was called the Two Horse Brand until the Levi’s name was adopted in 1928, which is why the walls say Copper Riveted Overalls and not Levi’s jeans.

Painted walls were the medium of the moment. Itinerant sign painters, wall dogs in the trade, moved from town to town painting merchants’ names and the brands they stocked, using lead-heavy paint that is the reason the signs survive. Levi Strauss and Co. moved on to silent-movie slides in the 1910s, billboards and store displays in the 1930s to 50s, and radio in the 1960s. The walls stayed.

The surviving Levi’s ghost signs

No Levi’s wall sign is documented in Idaho, and Jacksonville is the only one documented in Oregon. If you know of another, we would like the photograph.

Jacksonville: the wall and the valley behind it

Jacksonville was the commercial center of Southern Oregon from the gold strike at Rich Gulch in December 1851 until the railroad bypassed it in the 1880s; the county seat moved to Medford in 1927 and the town was left largely as it was, which is why the whole district became a National Historic Landmark in 1966. Historic Jacksonville explains that in the late 1800s the town’s brick buildings doubled as billboards. The Levi’s wall is one of several ghost signs there. Which merchant’s name runs across the top of it is not settled by any published source we can find, and we will not guess in print; the photograph shows a name ending in and Co. above General Merchandise, and the town’s general-merchandise houses of the period included farmers’ and miners’ suppliers, which is exactly who stocked riveted overalls.

What the wall says about the region is the useful part. Riveted denim came to the Rogue Valley with the miners, stayed for the orchards after 1885, the mills of Medford, Grants Pass and Roseburg, and the cattle of the Klamath Basin, and it was worn by families who are still there: the Oregon Century Farm and Ranch Program has registered more than 1,200 farms and ranches held by one family for a hundred years or longer, including a Klamath County ranch founded in 1873 and still in the founders’ great-great-grandson’s hands. Summers are dry enough that a jacket left in a loft does not rot. No valuable denim find in Oregon has been reported the way the Nevada mine pairs have; the same conditions exist, and nobody has looked.

Fort Bidwell and Dayton: the other two-horse walls

Fort Bidwell, in the far northeast corner of California, may hold the oldest surviving Levi’s advertisement anywhere. It is on the south wall of the Henry Kober and Co. mercantile, a Levi Strauss and Co. retail customer from 1909, and it carries the guarantee the company printed for decades: A New Pair Free if They Rip. Dayton, Nevada, on the road out of the Comstock, keeps its sign on the original general-merchandise building that sold the overalls. Both are ranch and mining towns of the kind where the 1880s pair that sold for $87,400 in 2022 was found, in a Nevada mine, by someone who went looking.

Why the walls matter to anyone clearing a closet

A painted Levi’s wall means a merchant in that town was selling copper riveted overalls by the crate a hundred and twenty years ago, to miners, ranch hands, mill workers and orchard crews, most of whom never moved away. Their jeans and jackets did not become collectible until the 1980s, long after they had gone into a trunk, a loft or the back of a closet. The picker circuits that swept the coasts rarely reached these towns. So a wall sign is not just a photograph. It is a reason to check the barn.

The checklist is short. A strap and buckle across the back of jeans means pre-war. A capital E on the red tab means before 1971. One chest pocket on a denim jacket means a Type 1, the jacket we paid $12,000 for. Old Lee, Wrangler and overall labels count too. Do not wash any of it, and text photos to (949) 449-1255 for a free read. We travel anywhere in the United States for the right pieces, and for a few items we pay through PayPal before you ship, with shipping on us.