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A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Winifred B. Rothenberg
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Students of agricultural history, of pre-industrial labor productivity, of New England town histories, and, especially, of pre-1840 rates of economic growth have long needed a price index of Massachusetts farm prices for this period. The article presents two indexes, covering 15 farm products, weighted by their relative importance, first in 1800, then in 1855. Among the several issues raised by the behavior of farm prices between 1750 and 1855, one of the most interesting may be what this behavior reveals about the market imbeddedness of these farmers, particularly in view of the fact that the prices come, not from market quotations, but from farm account books.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 975 - 1001
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1979

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References

1 David, Paul A., “The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840: New Evidence, Controlled Conjectures,” this Journal, 27 (June 1967), 152Google Scholar.

2 Cole, Arthur Harrison, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Professor Bezanson did construct an (unweighted) index, 1821–25 = 100, continuous from 1720 to 1861 (omitting the Revolution) on the prices of 20 commodities, only 6 of which would be relevant to Massachusetts farmers. See Cole, Wholesale Prices, pp. 112–14, and Chart 52.

4 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

5 Ibid., p. 18.

6 Thurston M. Adams, “Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers for Goods and Services and Received by Them for Farm Products, 1790–1940; Wages of Vermont Farm Labor, 1780–1940,” Bulletin No. 507, Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Vermont and State Agricultural College (Burlington, Vt., Feb. 1944).

7 Ibid., 101.

8 Ibid., 11.

9 “Changed regional terms of trade over this period (1850–60) largely reflect improved transport conditions; western farmers far from the market received relatively more for their output than eastern farmers closer in.” Fishlow, Albert, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 45Google Scholar.

10 In order to isolate cyclical movements, I fitted trends to all three indexes and plotted deviations from trend. Several kinds of trends were tried, the one in each case with the best fit was chosen. In the case of the Massachusetts farm price index, a linear trend fitted well: r = +.86. To the Warren-Pearson index I fitted two piece-wise trends, both in In x, In y: 1750–1814: r = +.75; 1814–1855: r = -.68. To the Bezanson index, three curves had to be fitted because of the omission of the Revolutionary War years: a linear trend, r = +.70 to the 1750–1774 segment, and curves in In x, In y to 1784–1814 (r = +.86), and to 1814–1855 (r = -.74). For each of the three indexes, trend values were computed for each year and the deviations of the observations from trend for each year were plotted with respect to a straight line at trend.

11 Fishlow, American Railroads, p. 42.

12 Lebergott, Stanley, “Comments on Measuring Agricultural Change,” in Farming in the New Nation: Interpreting American Agriculture, 1790–1840, Kelsey, Darwin, ed., Agricultural History Society (Washington, D.C., 1972), p. 227Google Scholar.

13 Jones, Alice Hanson, American Colonial Wealth, Vol. 2 (New York, 1977), 627 ffGoogle Scholar.

14 See the discussion of this issue in the English context in Overton, Mark, “Estimating Crop Yields from Probate Inventories: An Example from East Anglia, 1585–1735,” this Journal, 39 (June 1979), 373Google Scholar.

15 “When two varieties of an item are selling in volume simultaneously, the assumption that a difference in price between them is entirely due to a quality difference is realistic and reasonable.” Hoover, Ethel D., “Index Numbers: Practical Applications,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 7 (1968), pp. 163–64Google Scholar.

16 “The law redeeming the old paper money set its ratio at £ 7.50 Old Tenor to £ 1.00 Lawful Money, a ratio of some importance, since many people continued to keep accounts in Old Tenor.” McCusker, John J., Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), p. 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Fisher, Willard C., “The Tabular Standard in Massachusetts History,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 27 (May 1913), 436, 452–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Price and output data have been gathered for 32 towns, but in 1801 valuations, the assessors, inexplicably, neglected to return any figures on grain outputs in West Springfield. In 1855, the 32 towns become 31 because Biddeford (Maine) is no longer part of Massachusetts.

19 Making no demands on the corn crop, but an important component of livestock feed, was corn stover—the husks and stalks—which in the South was left in the field, but in New England was harvested as cattle feed. Parker, William N., “A Note on Regional Culture in the Corn Harvest,” Agricultural History, 46 (Jan. 1972), 181–89Google Scholar.

20 Titow, J. Z., Winchester Yields: A Study in Medieval Agricultural Productivity (Cambridge, England, 1972)Google Scholar.

21 Contrast these with the seed/yield ratios estimated for the South. Raymond C. Battalio and John Kagel base their calculations on the following estimates: corn: 10 bu. yield per acre, ½ bu. seed; oats: 11 bu. yield per acre, 1.1 bu. seed; rye: 7 bu. yield per acre, 0.75 bu. seed. “The Structure of Antebellum Slave Agriculture: South Carolina: A Case Study,” Agricultural History, 44 (Jan. 1970), 28 n. William N. Parker and Judith L. V. Klein estimate that northern per acre yields were double those in the South. “Productivity Growth in Grain Production in the United States, 1840–60 and 1900–10,” Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 30 (New York, 1966), 532, 551Google Scholar.

22 According to Jay Adams, who, as farmer at Old Sturbridge Village, attempts to replicate the fanning practices of Massachusetts circa 1800. Bidwell says “a few weeks.” Bidwell, Percy W. and Falconer, John I., History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, (New York, 1941), p. 111Google Scholar.

23 Allowing horses to consume twice as much hay as cattle seems correct: horses eat all the time, cattle must stop to regurgitate. In the seventeenth century twice as much acreage was allotted in the town common per horse as per cow. Two tons per horse and one ton per head of cattle may still be too much: the 1818 inventory of the estate of Daniel Brigham of Marlborough specifies that each cow consumed ½ ton hay, and each horse 1 ton per year.

24 This was the estimate of Mr. Hubbard in his reply to Question 10 in the 1807 Papers for the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture.

25 Leonard Jarvis, “General Account of the Exports from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…,” The Massachusetts Magazine, 1789, p. 168, line 10.

26 A Letter from England, in the Papers of the MSPA, 1804, recommends feeding 1 bushel potatoes to 10 lbs. hay per ox per day; that is, 6 times as much potatoes as hay! It is Bidwell's opinion that in Massachusetts in this period potatoes were not fed to stock except in hill towns where corn was not grown. Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, p. 241.

27 Bidwell thought that only the Scots actually ate oats. Ibid., pp. 14 and 97. But Sarah McMahon has observed, in her examination of over 1,200 probate inventories, that oats—often in the form of oat meal—were kept in garrets with the family provisions, rather than in barns or sheds with hay and stover for the stock.

28 Bidwell and Falconer, p. 229.

29 Ibid., p. 229.

30 Ibid., p. 229

31 It appears that almost all milk in 1800 was turned into butter or cheese on Massachusetts farms before 1844. T. M. Adams does not bring fluid milk into his Vermont farm price index until 1905. I have found one entry in an account book for the sale of skim milk: “November 10, 1815, To 340 qts skim milk at 1 ct & ½ a qt.” Nahum Fay, Northborough.

32 Gallman, Robert, “Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South,” Agricultural History, 44 (Jan. 1970), 18Google Scholar.

33 The average live weight of Massachusetts hogs, calculated from probate inventory appraisals, was 224 lbs. in 1780–1805. The average live weight of Southern hogs, as estimated by Gallman and Genovese, was 192 lbs. over a half-century later (see Ibid., p. 15). The fattening period in Massachusetts in 1800 was about one month, whereas the fattening period in the South in 1860 was four or five months.

34 Sheep and horse meats are not included among the meats in the construction of this index. Horse meat, as far as I know, was not eaten; lamb prices do occasionally appear, but far too infrequently to be part of an index.

35 Following Battalio and Kagel, “The Structure of Antebellum Slave Agriculture,” 36.

36 “The pigs from a full-grown sow will generally be 12 in number, these should be thinned down to eight….”; Ellsworth, Henry W., The American Swine Breeder (Boston, 1840), p. 195Google Scholar. And, as early as 1777, English sows (that is, the sows of English gentlemen-farmers) had litters of 13 to 14 pigs, three times a year, according to The Complete Farmer or, A General Dictionary of Husbandry in All Its Branches…, by a Society of Gentlemen, Members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (3rd ed.; London, 1777), n.p.

37 There is no way to know whether these are live or dressed weights, which is why I had used probate inventory appraisals in 1800.

38 Assuming, with Ellsworth, that 8 pigs out of 12 were raised.

39 Frederick Strauss and Louis H. Bean, “Gross Farm Income and Indices of Farm Production and Prices in the United States, 1869–1937,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Technical Bulletin No. 703 (December, 1940), p. 591.

40 Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, p. 241.

41 Titow, Winchester Yields, p. 20.

42 It is more likely, for instance, that a hog in 1851 was alive when he weighed 390 lbs, for if that were a dressed weight he would have weighed an improbable 520 lbs. alive. It is far less clear in the case of the hog weighing 213 lbs. But I shrink from manipulating each weight to fit a preconceived notion of what it should be. Thomas Senior Berry, in his study of the Cincinnati hog market, came to a different decision with respect to this “troublesome complication.” Winter hog quotations before 1844 he treated as live weights; winter hog quotations after 1844 he treated as dressed. But there were institutional factors—slaughter houses, packing houses, drovers, feeders—regularizing the Cincinnati meat market as individual Massachusetts farmers were not. See Berry, , Western Prices Before A 1861: Study of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 144–45Google Scholar.

43 Berry, Western Prices, p. 226.