How Much Was A Penny Worth In 1793?

Is condor101 a reputable source here on CCF? I think so, and hopefully your teacher will too! Nice explanation condor101, Well done.

A nights stay at an inn cost about the same as a beer? Bet they didn't let you keep the little soaps.

I have some old Church minutes from 1829. In it the workmen who built the church were paid 1 and 3/4 of a cent a hour.

Let's put that into perspective. In 1829, land was selling for $2 an acre. So at 7/4 a day, divided by 800/4 for an acre of land, it would take a little over 114 hours to earn enough money to buy an acre of land. Or a bit over 11 days wages. And that sounds reasonable. Especially when you realize that it would have taken longer than that since they would have had to pay for food and drink, and other sundries and necessities.

This Link will show some of the cost in the British Army, I would suspect out coinage would have similiar value since they were all based on the same weights of copper at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briti...enth_century

This link gives a good overview on the cost of a loaf of bread. http://www.johnhearfield.com/History/Breadt.htm

Essentially a loaf of bread in 1800 cost 1 and a Half Cents. In 1793 it would have cost the same.

Hope this helps

I can see another difficulty. If you equate a Two Cents to a loaf of bread, then you could say that a penny is worth 50 times more now than then. On the other hand if you equate 2 cents to an 1/100 of the price of an acre of land. And that same acre is currently worth about $6000, then a cent of 1793 would be worth $30.

Bread is cheaper now than then, with more volume for the mills, and the processes industrialized. So while the comparisons are interesting, they are not direct. The same with Cement which used to be very labor intensive and so very expensive. But with industialization is now very very cheap.

I would think land is a good vehicle for your comparison.

Tough to draw a direct comparison but a good guess is somewhere between 50 cents and one dollar equivalent buying power. Depends, of course, on what you are buying. Transportation across great distances would, for example, be extraordinarily expensive and risky relative to modern equivalents. Getting to California in 1793 from New York would be comparable to taking a trip into space.

I think the posters focusing on the purchasing power in that era vs a straight mathematical calculation of historic inflation rates aggregated over time is the way to go. Various products and services are priced wildly different in today's world than in the early days of the republic.

Remember that in the far past, salt was so valuable they paid roman soldiers their salary ("salary" has same etymological root as "salt") in salt. Now you can get salt for almost pennies as extraction, refining, marketing, and transportation technologies have been perfected and have driven its value and cost down.

I'd say the key to getting the answer you need is finding one or more documented examples from the 1790s as far as what a commonly purchased product or service cost and contrast that with the perceived value of one cent today.

This is an excellent reference I used some data from it to come up with the 50 cent estimate:

http://books.google.com/books/about...OpIeAQAAIAAJ

In 1921 the country was in a post war recession as it came down from the industrial build up from WWI. The mint also used this post war slump as a chance to redirect much of their activity toward the recoining of all the silver required under the Pitman act.

In 1914 the west was still rather sparcely settled and also Philadelphia struck a much larger number of cents that year than normal. There probably just wasn't as much need for them. Coinage was probably apportioned to each mint based on local need. If there were plenty of cents available in the Denver distribution area then production would be lowered.

1877, possibly a lowering of coinage due to the flood of silver coins returning to outside the country. Coinage was flooding back into the Treasury including 1 and 5 cent pieces so there was not much need to coin more. Just ship the older coins back out again as needed.