I will be interested to see the responses to this from a New England perspective. I can comment on West Coast prices during that decade.

My co-editor and I dealt with this subject when dealing with an 1850 letter from two rural Pennsylvania young men who had gone "to see the elephant" - that is, had gone to California for the Gold Rush. They wrote home to comment on the exorbitant prices on the West Coast. This appeared in our book, The Gold Rush Letters of E. Allen Grosh and Hosea B. Grosh (2012). Prices fluctuated radically in nineteenth-century San Francisco, reflecting successes or failures in the gold fields, short-term scarcity, and other factors.

Here is an excerpt from a letter dated January 12, 1850 from San Francisco to their father in Pennsylvania:

Our ideas of the dearness of things are very different here than at home. The scale by which we measure them being generally larger and having a different system of figure. If you at home had to pay 25 cents a pound for common potatoes, 25 cents for fresh beef, 50 for veal, 75 for pork, $2.50 to $4 a quarter for lamb and mutton, 25 cents a loaf for bread (about our 5 cent loaves) they have been as high as 50 butter, $1.50 cheese, $1.00 dried peaches, $.75 to $1.00 apples, the same raisins from $.50 to $1.25, and other dried fruits about the same and all the other necessaries of life in proportion it would seem enormous as it did to us on our first arrival yet in a short time we have become used to it. Wholesale and retail prices are very different. Charges are generally by shillings even in the most trifling things and not as at home by cents. Retailers have to make large profits to pay the rents they do. A small store not near the central business portion of the city paying $250 per month, and some running up to thousands as they approach the central portion rents are so much a month; so are all interest operations and generally everything of the kind is paid in advance. I speak far within bounds when I say that there is not any other city in the world in which property and rents are as high as here. Some frail light houses on a small spot of ground often bringing what in Broadway, New York would be considered an enormous rent for some of their palace-like buildings, some of them 70, 80, and even a hundred dollars a day. I write this to you though I would not have it published therefore, though I assure you it is strictly true. What is to be the result of this enormous inflation? I must say that though a fall is inevitable, the time may be pretty distant …. You cannot I suppose obtain a building lot in any portion of the city for less than about $50 per month enormous as this may seem to you who are initiated into San Francisco prices.