Rochester, MA c. 1780

Days a carpenter needed to work to earn* these items:

Prices*

NOTE:
The population is for 1776, and at this time Rochester included Marion, Mattapoisett, and a small portion of Fairhaven.

*At the urging of the Continental Congress, Rochester, like many other towns, established maximum prices for select items in 1777 as part of the effort to control currency values. This particular approach was unsuccessful and the Revolution saw significant inflation. After the war prices returned to normal, if marginally higher. Nonetheless, the 1777 maximum prices are interesting because they reveal what types of items were perceived to be central to daily life3 as well as relative values among traded items and wages. Ultimately, the voted amounts are suggestive of prices both before and then after the war.4

British currency abbreviations and values:
pound (£), shilling (s), pence (d), farthing (f)
4 farthings = 1 pence, 12 pence = 1 shilling, and 20 shillings = 1 pound.

MORE

Learn about Rochester, MA in 1850

FOOTNOTES

1 Mattapoisett, MA and Mary Hall Leonard, Mattapoisett and Old Rochester, Massachusetts : being a history of these towns and also in part of Marion and a portion of Wareham (New York: The Grafton Press, c. 1907), 143.

2 "Mattapoisett Shipbuilding," New Bedford Evening Standard, January 8, 1897.

3 Lyford, James O., ed. and City History Commission, Concord, NH, History of Concord, New Hampshire From the Original Grant in Seventeen Hundred and Twenty-Five to the Opening of the Twentieth Century (Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, 1903), 270-271.

4 Schuettinger, Robert L. and Eamonn F. Butler. Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation/ Caroline House, 1979) Chapter IV: The New Republic Tries Old Experiments, Washington Battles Starvation.

SOURCES

Lyford, James O., ed. and City History Commission, Concord, NH. History of Concord, New Hampshire From the Original Grant in Seventeen Hundred and Twenty-Five to the Opening of the Twentieth Century. Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, 1903. Web. Accessed Jan. - July 2014. https://www.concordnh.gov/index.aspx?NID=1047, https://www.concordnh.gov/DocumentCenter/View/743

Mattapoisett, MA and Mary Hall Leonard. Mattapoisett and Old Rochester, Massachusetts : being a history of these towns and also in part of Marion and a portion of Wareham. New York: The Grafton Press, c. 1907. Amazon Digital Services. Kindle edition, 2012. Also see HathiTrust. Web. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081829651;view=1up;seq=9
See pp. 363-366 for "A List of Maximum Prices; Rochester, 1777"

"Mattapoisett Shipbuilding." New Bedford Evening Standard. January 8, 1897.

Mendell, Charles S., Jr. " Shipbuilders of Mattapoisett." Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches. Number 66 (1937).

Rochester, MA. Vital records of Rochester, Massachusetts, to the year 1850. Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogial Society, at the charge of the Eddy town-record fund, 1914. Web. Accessed 20 July 2014. https://archive.org/details/vitalrecordsofro01roch

Schuettinger, Robert L. and Eamonn F. Butler. Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation/ Caroline House, 1979. scribd. Web. Accessed Jan. - July 2014. https://www.scribd.com/doc/117994891/Forty-Centuries-of-Wage-and-Price-Controls-How-Not-to-Fight-Inflation

Wood, Edward F. R., Jr. comp. with Judith Navas Lund. The Ports of Old Rochester: Shipbuilding at Mattapoisett and Marion. New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Whaling Museum/Quadequina Publishers, 2004.

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