Prices!

[Hank Trent]

Thought someone might enjoy this. It's a list of prices paid for, well, just about everything, in northern Ohio 1856-1857.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PXxOAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA81

It includes everything from bricks to mop handles to tomatoes, ads in the newspaper, books, furniture, labor for female cooks and male steam pipe fitters. You can also see when various fruits and vegetables come in season, all the beef they bought at butchering time, etc.

It's the charges for an insane asylum, so you can also see one person was paid for amusing the patients and another was paid for catching runaways ("elopers").

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: Prices!

This is pretty cool stuff, especially in giving prices for a whole range of miscellaneous stuff you don't often see (mousetraps!). Did you notice that while most prices are given as '$' or 'c' there are some 's' ? It's too many to be a typo; I think they may be "shillings." According to Bartlett's dictionary, that was still the term used in New York for the Spanish real of 12 1/2 cents, which would be a "bit" in the south and a "levy" in DC or Pennsylvania. This seems born out by the 25 lbs. of sugar, each one 's', on page 95, which comes to $3.12.