Grouping of six articles of clothing, three trousers and three vests, found in the family home of Theophilus Frank of the 48th North Carolina Infantry. Frank was a soldier and sharecropper who lived in Davidson County, North Carolina. Discovered in 1977 by Les Jensen (curator of Arms and Armor at West Point) and others, the garments hold special significance as rare survivors of a sharecropper’s clothing worn from the 1860s-1880s. Interestingly, Jensen speculates in a letter to a former owner of this grouping that two of the trousers offered here could have been worn during Frank’s Civil War service. Without further evidence, their military history is difficult to substantiate, but Jensen was unwilling to rule out the possibility. In any case, as Jensen concludes in an accompanying 2005 letter: “if this material were taken simply as a southern sharecropper’s clothing and nothing else, it would be far, far rarer than any uniform. Virtually anything that survives from the lower classes of southern society [during the Reconstruction era] is extraordinarily rare.”

For poor white Southerners, the end of the Civil War meant the loss of their way of life and the collapse of the plantation system that had sustained them. Many found themselves without land, employment, or resources to support their families. In rural areas, sharecropping became a common arrangement where impoverished farmers, both black and white, worked on land owned by others in exchange for a portion of the crops. However, this system often kept farmers in a cycle of debt and dependence, with limited opportunities for upward mobility.

The clothing offered here is scarce material evidence of the time, worn by a member of the southern sharecropping class.


Included is a lengthy material analysis of each garment, copies of letters from Les Jensen, documentation detailing the Theophilus Frank group discovery, and more. Serious parties are encouraged to request a copy of these files.

In-house shipping is not available for this lot.

Theophilus “Theo” Frank (1823-1884) was born in Davidson County, North Carolina and enlisted in the 48th North Carolina in 1863. Letters written by Frank during his Civil War service are kept by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.








[Civil War, Union, Confederate]