colonial money

[brokenflint]

Not sure if this is the right forum, but for those of you who are interested the following link shows colonial printed currency, good reference on fonts and design  http://www.coins.nd.edu/ColCurrency/index.html

Broke

[Ky-Flinter]

Great site!  Thanks.

-Ron

[Artificer]

Yes indeed, thank you.

This got me started on attempting to get a better idea of "what things really cost back then."  I'm sure someone has done a cost analysis in "real dollars," but I've never seen one and have always been interested in it.
What I would love to see is how much things cost from an "average" yearly wage or hourly wage in the 18th century.  That could be somewhat transposed to an average wage today, though there are problems with that.

For example, leather used to be a lot more costly - at least leather that was tanned commercially.  The time it took to vat tan cowhides and the demand for leather kept the price a lot higher than what we pay today.  I don't really have a good idea how much more good harness grade leather cost, but it was significantly more than we pay by our average wages today.

[omark]

back in the late60's- early 70's i understood that a pound of black powder during the buffalo hunting time period was the equivelant of $500. sounds out of proportion to me, but, what do i know?  mark

[Brian]

That's about what it costs here in Canada now ............   

Okay, well, perhaps not quite that much.  At $500 a pound for powder one can see why they used to want to make every shot count.