I used to work at a store called the Nature Company, a place that sold soothing candles, backpacks, books about animals, and my favorite item: rain sticks. The rain sticks were made from dried cactus and filled with pebbles of volcanic rock. When you tilted the stick back and forth, it sounded a lot like rain. And that's actually very similar to how stagehands created the rain sound effect in the good old days of theater.
A rain box (as seen in the photograph above) was larger, heavier, and a whole lot louder than a rain stick. Instead of pebbles, most rain boxes contained dried peas. Rain boxes were just one of the many simple yet innovative backstage tools used to create sound effects, many of which are still used today, despite our reliance on digital sound. Eric Heart's Prop Agenda has reprinted a terrific article from the early 1900s, detailing all of the tricks of the sound effects trade.
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