Hello helpful people of Reddit! I’m looking for ideas for Colonial America (anything 18th century America, really) era props, and I actually made a Reddit account just for this. I read through the rules, and I’m hoping that the title isn’t misleading and that this isn’t too vague of a request.
I’m currently making a 3D environment out of this:
https://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-21/ac3-new-york-warehouse.html
This is a warehouse set in Colonial America during the Revolutionary War from the game Assassins Creed 3. The concept is really cool, but I wanted to fill it with a greater variety of props, and I also wanted them to make sense and be relevant and accurate to the time.
My question to all of you knowledgeable scholars is what else could I include in the warehouse? What other war time supplies might they have needed and been storing here?
If you have any picture references, those would be extremely helpful. If not, I’m happy to do some googling.
Anything you could recommend would be extremely helpful, even if it’s just pointing me in the direction of some other helpful resources, or some accurate recreated images of what I’ve already got planned. Thanks in advance.
If you are thinking of a store, selling general merchandise, ledgers from the period show some purchases to be quite common. Of the ones I have gone through ( circa 1780's) you see quite a lot of cloth being bought- or, at least, dry goods: canvas, buckram, calico, osnaburg, ribbon, lacing ...things like that. Not interesting to draw, but a very big item in sales- clearly people are making clothes. There would be a lot of whiskey, rum ( there were a few different grades of rum) wine, dispensed by the pint or quart presumably from barrels. Tobacco. Sugar (which would be sold in paper-covered cones, and so perhaps fun to draw), molasses ( by the quart or pint) flour, nails, hinges, latches, shoe buckles. Rarely guns, but then in the area I was studying ( Virginia) and the time there would be several options for gunsmith shops. Table knives ( often bone handles) , pocket knives, spoons, paper, ink. The occasional book of instruction ( usually spelling and grammar) or religious texts. . There would also be items brought in by customers to credit their accounts: farm produce like bushels of corn, sawn planks, cowhides.
If you'd like to browse one yourself, there are a number that survived . A Long Island library has transcribed one from the period, from the Townsend family, and has also posted a very useful guide for the meanings of the different terms etc. that would be useful in reading almost any ledger.