Growing up near historic Morristown, New Jersey, I often felt very close to the early American era. I worked for a summer at the local Museum of Early Trades and Crafts, where I handled, categorized and labeled artifacts from the daily lives of Colonial Americans. My sister worked as a docent just up the road in Jockey Hollow, now a national historic park, where George Washington and his troops spent a bitter winter in 1789 and 1790.
At Jockey Hollow’s Wick House, the home of the farmer on whose land Washington camped his troops, my sister would don an old-timey outfit and tell visitors about the Wicks while performing daily activities of Colonial life. Some of her responsibilities? “We used a Dutch oven to cook in the fireplace, and I made cornbread, soup, biscuits and cookies,” she says. “I would wash the dishes by pumping water into two basins: one with soap to scrub, one to rinse them off. We made candles by dipping string into melted wax. There was a kitchen garden we sometimes tended. The beds were made with woven rope underneath, which sometimes had to be tightened—and that’s apparently what the phrase ‘sleep tight’ meant!”
Yes, a lot has changed since this whole American experiment started on July 4, 1776 … or has it? In some ways, people’s lives are surprisingly similar. “Persistence, advocacy, sacrifice and dedication by ordinary Americans helped achieve the independence of the United States,” says Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. “Today, we employ those same attributes as we support causes, improve our communities and strive to achieve ideals we believe in.” And then there’s the price of butter, which, believe it or not, has not changed all that much over the past 250 years!
Ahead, Skic and our other experts—Cathleene B. Hellier, PhD, senior historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Robyn Schroeder, PhD, an affiliate history faculty member at William & Mary and the assistant director of the college’s National Institute of American History and Democracy—tell us what it was really like to live in 1776 vs. today, just in time for America’s birthday.
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How different was America in back in 1776?
America itself was vastly different than it is today, comprised of only the original 13 Colonies. Many Colonies were also smaller in size than their corresponding states today, totaling just 430,000 square miles along 1,000 miles of Atlantic coastline. Now, the U.S. spans from coast to coast across 3,809,525 square miles, about nine times larger than it was in 1776.
Of course, the population was also much smaller: In 1780 (the closest Census Bureau estimate to 1776), around 2.8 million people lived in the Colonies. Today, at 342 million people, the population of the U.S. is almost 123 times greater.
With no modern conveniences or technology in 1776, it’s hard to imagine how different life was. Homes were smaller, particularly for the average “middling” class, as it was known. And many people grew their own food, made their own clothes and even made their own soap to clean them. We probably wouldn’t last a week in 1776 with all the things we’d need to learn how to do!
Life in 1776 vs. today
While we have a vague sense of how different things were back then, direct comparisons really drive home that point. Just how big were those homes? How much were people paying for groceries? What did they eat, and how did they spend their free time? Get ready to take a trip back through history with these facts about America in its early years.
Homes
1776: The average rural home might include two rooms and a sleeping loft measuring 18 x 20 feet (about 360 square feet), with no indoor plumbing and only a fireplace for heat (which required lots of wood chopping!). “Average, yeoman houses would have been very different from places like Mount Vernon or Monticello, the houses that come to mind when you imagine this era, and different, too, from urban dwellings of tradespeople,” Schroeder says. “Several hundred thousand dwellings, most of them modest, would have populated the Colonial landscape of the 1770s.”
2026: Today’s average suburban home is a whopping 2,447 square feet, with three or four bedrooms and at least two bathrooms, in addition to a living room, dining room, kitchen and, often, family room. Today’s homebuyers also crave an office, finished basement, laundry room, pantry and more.
Average family size
1776: In the late 1770s, the average family consisted of 5.7 people. “Who made up a household in Revolutionary America varied, as it does today,” Skic says. “Back then, households could include a nuclear family but also extended family, including multiple generations under one roof, indentured servants and enslaved people.”
Blended families were also normal, Hellier says, as they are today. But instead of being due to divorce, they were a product of shorter lifespans and parental death, particularly the death of women during childbirth.
2026: Although today’s homes are way bigger than in the Colonial period, families are much smaller, with households averaging just 2.5 people. That’s the result of families having fewer children, of course, as well as more people living alone. “The size of the average American household today is nearly half the average size of an American household at the time of the Revolutionary War,” Skic says.
Personal space and privacy
1776: With a large family and a small living area, personal space really wasn’t a thing. There were no parents saying, “Go to your room!”—unless they were wealthy. And it’s hard to imagine how families were so big when parents had no privacy! “Living with many people in such small quarters was possible because of the array of outbuildings they would have had: granaries, summer kitchens, timber supply, necessaries (outhouses), brew-houses, laundries and stables, and more successful families might have dairies,” Schroeder says. “We can also surmise that most people spent more time outside their houses.”
Even when not at home, today’s social rules of personal space didn’t really exist. During the Continental Congress in September 1776, delegates John Adams and Benjamin Franklin had to share a bed—and apparently argued about whether to keep the window open or shut!
2026: Privacy is a much bigger deal for modern Americans. Spending “me time” is a priority, and even when we’re connecting online with others, we’re often physically alone. Our houses are big enough to spread out, and kids as well parents get their own bedrooms. The first time we might have to share our sleeping space with a stranger is in a college dorm room.
Travel
1776: The average person in Colonial America didn’t take vacations. “Some people never left the county they were born in because they had no reason to travel,” Hellier says. People, mostly men, mainly traveled for business. But the time it took depended on how you traveled and what the conditions of the roads were. For example, walking, the most common way of getting around, from Washington, D.C., to New York City would take about three weeks in the best-case scenario; on horseback, one to two weeks.
During the Revolutionary War, delegates traveled to attend the Continental Congress and to join the army, often followed by their wives. “Many ‘regular’ men who fought in the army traveled far from home to places they would not otherwise have visited,” Hellier says. Still, it was a lot easier to travel by water, which was why maritime trade was big. “[Traders] traveled extensively by sea—along the American coast, to the Caribbean, to Britain,” Hellier says. In addition, travel inland along rivers and canals was quicker than over land for transporting goods.
2026: Our main road-trip gripe these days is traffic, which slows us down—but in a very different way! Cars can travel on the highway (legally) at 65 or 70 miles per hour, compared to 4 to 5 miles per hour on horseback, and a measly 2 miles per hour walking over rugged roads in 1776. We can make it from D.C. to New York in three to four hours, without traffic, on I-95.
The cost of everyday items
1776: This is a hard one for historians to estimate, because although the Colonies used pounds, shillings and pence, the value of each was different from Colony to Colony and from British currency, so there was no standardization. In addition, goods were often bartered or traded instead of using money, and economic records and statistics weren’t kept on a larger scale. That said, historians have come up with some comparisons. For example, a pound of butter in 1776 cost around 4 pence, or about $3 today.
2026: The cost of groceries has been notoriously high lately, but butter is actually not that much more expensive today. The national average is around $4 a pound.
The most popular jobs
1776: By far, the most popular job in 1776 was farming, with the first census in 1790 finding 90% of Americans in agriculture. “Farmers and plantation owners primarily learned agriculture from parents or other relatives, and they also continued to learn by experimenting with different methods for fertilizing and controlling pests,” Hellier says. Even George Washington, a wealthy landowner, considered himself a “farmer first” and learned new agricultural methods to improve the industry.
Next on the rung of popular jobs were merchants and skilled tradesmen, such as blacksmiths, coopers (barrel makers), tailors, printers and dressmakers. “Trades here focused on producing the goods and services needed for daily life,” Hellier says. The Revolutionary War also brought new job opportunities for women. “Perhaps 10% to 15% of the armies were women laundresses, cooks, artisans and merchants, many of them wives of enlisted men and officers,” she says.
2026: Home-health and personal-care aides comprise the most common jobs of 2026, followed by retail salespeople and fast-food workers. Health care is one of the fastest-growing fields today and, as a result, very in-demand. Theoretically, today you can have just about any job you want, provided you can afford the right education and training.
The most popular book
1776: The most popular book in Colonial America was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776. In modern terms, it went viral. Paine’s “pamphlet” argued in plain, easily accessible language why the Colonies would be better off with independence from the British king. Half a million copies in 25 editions were produced within the first year, making it the nation’s first bestseller.
2026: Novels, which hadn’t yet fully emerged as a genre in 1776, are generally the most widely read books today. The New York Times bestselling fiction book in 2026 so far is Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden, a heartwarming story about a mysterious man who makes unexpected connections with townspeople in present-day Georgia. The most popular nonfiction New York Times bestseller so far this year is Stranger, a memoir by Belle Burden looking back over 20 years at what led to the demise of her marriage.
Favorite foods
1776: This was the original “farm to table” movement, with average Colonists’ diets affected by what was locally grown and available, as well as influenced by their various European heritages and the Native American knowledge of crops. In New England, fish dishes were common, as were corn-based meals in the Northern states and rice-based in the South.
“Meals were typically breakfast in the early morning; dinner, the main meal of the day in the mid-to-late afternoon; and supper in the evening,” Hellier says. “Meat, fowl or fish was typically a featured part of the main course.”
2026: Our favorite foods to cook at home today are just as varied as they were in Colonial times, with influences from immigrants and locally abundant ingredients. Although the concerning trend of ultra-processed and fast food has been growing, in recent years Americans have rediscovered their love of a home-cooked meal—especially as prices rise.
In what will come as no surprise, chicken dominates our dinner plates, and according to reports, it’s consumed around twice as much as other meats. Hamburgers, of course, also have a prominent place in our diets, along with french fries and other potato products. As for dessert, they don’t say “as American as apple pie” for nothing … even if it didn’t actually originate in America!
Health and medicine
1776: Life was precarious in 1776. Without modern medicine or antibiotics, a simple cut could potentially kill you. “Illnesses and medical conditions that we might take for granted today or those that are easily managed nowadays could end up being deadly,” Skic says. Doctors at the time also didn’t believe in germs, which didn’t help. “The idea that diseases spread via ‘miasma’ or noxious air was more widely believed,” he says. “Doctors treated patients with medicines derived from plants and other organic materials, but this was a time before disinfection and penicillin. Those with formal medical training in Europe could perform surgeries and inoculations.”
Interesting fact: George Washington was a major proponent of the smallpox vaccine to keep the disease from spreading among his troops.
2026: Although some evidence-based medical treatments are still looked at with skepticism, scientists and doctors have made huge strides in understanding and treating disease. We now know that washing our hands and avoiding close contact with sick people can help keep us healthy, and we have a whole new world of antibiotics and other medicines to treat infections and diseases. That first antibiotic, by the way, hasn’t even celebrated its 100th birthday yet. Penicillin was (accidentally) discovered by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming in 1928.
Life expectancy
1776: Because treatments for sickness and injury weren’t very good, it’s no surprise many people didn’t live as long as they do today—or even survive childhood. Back then, the average life expectancy was 35 to 38 years old. “Average life expectancy in the United States today is roughly double what it was in 1776,” Skic says. “Higher infant mortality and childhood death rates compared to today’s rates are major factors in this difference.”
So if you lived past the age of 5 or 10, chances were much better you’d make it into older age: Ben Franklin, for example, was 84 when he died in 1790.
2026: Thankfully, today’s kids don’t face the same risks from disease as they did 250 years ago. The average life expectancy in the U.S. hit an all-time high in 2024 (the most recent year for stats) at 79 years old. But that number still lags behind other comparable countries, which have an average life expectancy of 82.7 years, about 3.7 years longer than the U.S.
School
1776: Many kids received an education back in the 1700s, but not necessarily in the way we think. “The general goal was to prepare children for the work they would do in life and their position in society,” Hellier says. “While public education was available in New England, it was typically a private matter elsewhere.” Children might be educated at a small private school, at a charity school for poor children, by tutors, by their parents, in a minister’s school, at a grammar school and college, as an apprentice or a combination.
“Most girls of middling status learned the basics: reading, writing and enough arithmetic to run a household or keep accounts,” Hellier says. “Girls of higher status might learn music, dance, French or other genteel accomplishments. Boys of higher status might learn Latin, history or geography, besides training for a profession. Enslaved people who performed trades or domestic duties received education that would enable them to do their jobs, such as literacy and numeracy skills.”
The records on how literacy rates varied among different races, genders and class are scarce. Historians estimate that around 90% of White men in New England could read in 1787, but only 48% of women; the numbers were slightly lower in the Southern states.
2026: Today, we’ve largely accomplished Thomas Jefferson’s goal of public schools that would teach “reading, writing and common arithmetick” to “all the free children, male and female,” with public schools nationwide. Still, national literacy rates are actually less than they were among White male New Englanders in the early years of the United States, with an overall literacy rate of U.S. adults today at 79%, according to the most recent data (2024).
Clothing
1776: Fashionable clothes were all the rage among the wealthy class, as they are today. “Historians call this period a consumer revolution, when the Atlantic world saw a vast increase in available goods and a hankering after fashionable items,” Hellier says. “Colonists imported vast amounts of textiles, from utilitarian to luxurious. Like today, some consumers went into debt to buy the goods they craved.”
Wealthier men wore short pants, or breeches, paired with waistcoats. Average middlings, though, dressed for practicality. “People did not only or primarily wear sleeves and long pants or skirts for modesty,” Schroeder says. “Lightweight clothing that protected the skin from sun and bug bites were functional necessities.”
With the Revolution, Colonists also came to dislike fancy British silks, which couldn’t be imported during the war anyway. They replaced these items with American-made linen and wool.
2026: Today, “fast” fashion has taken over. Clothes are produced quickly and cheaply for ravenous consumers, but they’re also poorly made, which means they have to be replaced often. Our clothes are simpler than they were in Colonial times, with comfortable clothing like T-shirts, jeans and athleisure worn most often. (We’re guessing all the men who wore breeches would be horrified!)
Cotton is the most popular fabric for clothing in the U.S. today, and our country is one of the world’s biggest producers of it. Modern synthetics like polyester, mainly imported from Asia, are also commonly sold and worn because they don’t wrinkle, they dry quickly and they’re cheap.
Leisure activities
1776: People in Colonial times weren’t so different than us when it came to their need for fun. “Vocal and instrumental music was popular, but you or your friends had to make it yourselves,” Hellier says. “Traveling troupes of actors performed in theaters. Reading, aloud or to oneself, was a form of leisure activity. Horseback riding and ball games were outdoor amusements.”
As for indoor fun, people played simple board games, including the Royall and the Most Pleasant Game of the Goose; card games like cribbage, loo and whist; and dice games like Hazard. People also whiled away their time with dancing, shopping and good, old-fashioned conversation. However, unlike us, “daily life and activities were also highly dependent on the weather and available light, either sunlight or candlelight,” Skic says.
2026: Just about everything on 1776’s list of fun activities is still true today, with a modern twist. But the biggest change in leisure activities has been the result of the internet and the constant presence of devices such as tablets and phones. Scrolling, playing video games and posting on social media are the new popular pastimes—although gossip was passed around communities nearly as easily in 1776 as it is online today.
What’s surprisingly similar about life in 1776 and today?
Yes, some aspects of daily life back then are inconceivable to us, but there are some very American throughlines in our history. For one, many people weren’t tied to their job and could even switch careers with the same industrious spirit Americans have today. “This was a very hierarchical society, but among the ‘middling sort,’ there was a lot of fluidity—what you might call mobility,” Schroeder says.
Like today, the soon-to-be United States was diverse, made up of immigrants from different cultures and classes who sometimes misunderstood one another, but they could come together when they recognized their similarities. The Revolutionary War itself helped do this, as people from all over ended up in army encampments together. “They were meeting each other across preconceptions that were engulfed by lifestyle divides—something about this feels familiar, doesn’t it?” Schroeder says. “The war created so much close-quarter contact between people who otherwise would never have met that you have to say it helped to create an American identity.”
And the same American optimism that’s shaped our culture was also present in the fledgling nation. “There’s another way people in this era were just like us: They were oddly confident, given how much was in flux and all the privations and problems they were up against,” Schroeder says. She quotes a letter from a woman in Williamsburg writing to her sister in England: “You see, my sister, I talk like an American; and well I may; she has been kinder to me than my native country; to her I owe everything I possess, and I will most cheerfully comply with whatever may be thought for the general good.”
This attitude represents the best that Americans can be, as we continue to fight for our rights as laid out in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and later the Constitution. “I recognize this country that welcomed strangers and earned their loyalty through fights for expanding liberty and civil rights, quite well,” Schroeder says. As should we all.
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Sources:
- Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia; email interview, June 2026
- Cathleene B. Hellier, PhD, senior historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; email interview, June 2026
- Robyn Schroeder, PhD, affiliate history faculty member at William and Mary, and assistant director of the college’s National Institute of American History and Democracy; email interview, June 2026
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