With the talk of fabric going up in price, I came across these in the current issue of "Family Tree Magazine". The attached pictures are charts from the Civil War era and bring prices into perspective. No wonder scraps were used and nothing was thrown away. Makes you wonder how they survived, doesn't it??

Wow, this is interesting information. Thank you for sharing.

Wow. 1864 and 1865 were really rough years. Interesting information. Thanks for sharing.

I had no idea that prices were like that back then. very interesting.

Very interesting. These were the Civil War years. Just like today, scarse commodities can equal high prices. Or is it that merchants can charge more, so they do. (Think about gas prices going up so much in the past month. Nobody has stopped exporting fuel to the United States.)

Very interesting. At the start of the civil war alot of the cotton mills were located in the south. I imagine alot (if all) of them were not running/operating on a/c of the war, which would be one reason why the prices were so very, very high!

Thanks for posting this. With all of the talk about prices going up, and they are, I couldn't help but think that there have been many other tough times in our history.

Thank you for the very interesting post which I will forward to my friends. Then there were African Americans who did not earn anything since most of them were working for free as enslaved persons. Would have been a good thing if the writers of the article had pointed that out when they made the distinctions in the wages of white people in the north and those in the south.

Wow, Those prices aren't that different from what we pay these days. I was an avid fan of the Little House on the Prairie books as a child, and now I know why they made it seem like such a treat it get a new piece of fabric!

Thanks - great info! Puts a new perspective on things today too ;-)