Cost of living?

[Oregon Zouave]

I am trying to find cost of every day items a family would be familiar with in 1861. Food, candy rent/purchase a house etc. Our group is from NYC visiting our officer father. Any help would be appreciated.

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: Cost of living?

Sorry I didn't see this earlier. Try "The Standard of Living in 1860" by Edgar W. Martin. Part of it is on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=2U4Um6kq0KcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+standard+of+living+in+1860#PPA418,M1

The whole might be available through your local library.

For example, some prices in Boston in 1860 (p. 418):

Corned beef, 10c a lb

Fresh pork, 12.5c a lb

Milk, 5c a quart

Eggs, 17-27c a dozen

Bread, 7.5c a loaf

Four room tenement (p. 422) $5.86 a month; six rooms, $6.54

bituminous coal, $5.75 a ton

There's lots of good stuff there. Enjoy!

[ElizabethClark]

Re: Cost of living?

Quick moderator note:

Oregon, you'll want to configure your profile to show a signature (first and last name), or else add it to each post and reply. Not many rules here, but that's one. :) If you need any help, let me or another moderator know, and we'll help you get set up with an auto-signature.

Mod-Bonnet Off.

This topic is also fully able to be discussed in the Citizen section (where military impressionists are very welcome, by the way--I've a big, broad lecture stump on the need for military men to know citizen life!)

Defining standard of living really reaches into a lot of research avenues. You'll want to know the area the family lives, what the profession is, what the war-time income is, how far that's stretching, how much they're paying to room/board at a local boarding house or hotel (visiting families happened--camping visiting families didn't as a general rule), how and where and the cost of train or other travel... so many factors are involved that it's impossible to define it in strictly generic terms.

[Beth Chamberlain]

Re: Cost of living?

One of my favorite sources is Comparative Wages, Prices, and Cost of Living, it's an offprint of From the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor published in 1885 but it covers 1752-1860. It's not widely held but it has recently shown up in Googlebooks, http://books.google.com/books?id=xA0XAAAAYAAJ

There are also some bibliographies of price information at http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php#northamerica.

For NYC the Times and the Brooklyn Eagle should also be useful. The Times archive is freely searchable, http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html. I haven't looked at advertisements in the Times for a while. The last time I did it was much easier to do in the commercial version, you might want to check if your library has access the the NYT Historical from ProQuest. The Brooklyn Eagle is also online, http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.o...AppName=2&GZ=T

If that doesn't give you enough let us know. There is more for the NYC area online but I'm tired and drawing a blank.

Elizabeth - can you help me with an avatar problem? Or tell me who can?

Beth