Lyle,
I would suggest starting with a survey of household budget studies, 
many of which cover the period in which you're interested, and the best 
place to start is the oppressively detailed annotated bibliography by 
Faith M. Williams and Carle C. Zimmerman (1935) Studies of Family 
Living in the United States and Other Countries: An Analysis of 
Material and Method.  Washington, DC: United States Department of 
Agriculture.  Dan Horowitz's book The Morality of Spending discusses 
those studies.
One rich study of food consumption is Thomas De Voe's 1867 The Market 
Assistant, containing a brief description of every article of human 
food sold in the public markets of the cities of New York, Boston, 
Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, which tackled the ambitious task of 
accounting for “every item of human food sold in the Public Markets.”  
Food marketing was still very regionally and locally specific at that 
point, but De Voe’s oppressively detailed tome provides a systematic 
look at foods in urban northeastern public markets at the end of the 
Civil War.  The post-Civil War marketplace still contained a vast range 
of foods and wild game that would be much more uncommon at the turn of 
the century:  For instance, De Voe inventoried a wide range of game 
that consumers could still expect to find in city markets, including 
possum, raccoon, bear, and elk.
Another very solid and detailed study is Edgar W. Martin's 1942 atudy 
The Standard of Living in 1860,  American Consumption Levels on the Eve 
of the Civil War, which has a ton of detail on the most mundane 
elements of household consumption before the war.

Paul


Quoting "Lyle E. Browning" <[log in to unmask]>:

> I'm working on a set of sites dating from the Reconstruction Era to
> the early electricity period (1865-1940) in tobacco country. The
> literature on the subject refers to average incomes per year in
> various places but never mentions the costs of basics, staples and/or
> farm machinery. Could someone point me in the direction of compiled
> information that has staple prices and income figures (cost of a loaf
> of bread, pound of butter, average yearly income, etc.) for that time
> period? Also, has anyone compiled farm equipment prices for that time
> period on a yearly or decade basis?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Lyle Browning, RPA
>



Paul R. Mullins
President-Elect, Society for Historical Archaeology
Chair, Dept. Anthropology
413B Cavanaugh Hall
Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-9847
http://www.iupui.edu/~anthpm/home.html