Prices back in the old days

I’m still reading Coolidge and sometimes the prices back around the turn of the 20th century are striking:

• “In 1890, professors’ salaries [at Amherst College] were $ 2,500, more than twenty times tuition. The step up from laborer to professor was immense, for the average wage earner in 1890 earned $425 a year. ” [i.e., tuition has gone from 1/20th of a professor’s salary to between 1/3 and 1/2]
• “[In 1894] Tuition at Harvard Law that year was $150, and the university catalog estimated additional expenses of up to $471.” [i.e., the tuition has gone from about $4000 in 2014 dollars (calculator used) to $52,350 (source).]
• “Homes in western Massachusetts ranged in price from $2,000 to $5,000, about what a young lawyer could earn in a year if he was lucky.” [Zillow says that the median sale price for a house or condo in Northampton is now $261,000, perhaps four times a young lawyer’s salary out there.]
• “The State House on Beacon Hill was a glorious structure, its cornerstone having been laid by Samuel Adams, the governor, who had arrived to deliver it with fifteen white horses. Its thirty-five-foot dome shone gold, having been freshly gilded in twenty-three-carat paint the autumn before at a price of $4,758.79, a sign that in autumn 1906, Massachusetts was feeling extravagant.” [Compare to present; the state government will spend $1 million to pay off-duty state police cars to park at the closed-for-construction Callahan Tunnel (Boston Herald).]
• Total federal income tax revenues for 1924: $1.84 billion [About $250 billion in today’s dollars, compared to about $3.78 trillion in current spending (Washington Post), i.e., enough to fund 24 days of our current government’s spending.]