A New Look at a Very Old Lottery
It’s titled Benefit Tickets in the Government Lottery of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, for the Sum of Thirty seven Thousand Five Hundred Pounds.
Erich L. commented that this was “Arguably the most MA thing to ever show up at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair,” as well as “the only surviving copy of the first official lottery results in the colonies.”
Indeed, according to Maggs Bros.’s sales material, this book isn’t listed in any of the standard catalogues of early American printed materials, nor found in the largest archives of our area. The firm’s representative at the fair, who really is named Fuchsia Voremberg, told WBZ that this is the only known copy of this book.
I suspect the book itself is supremely uninteresting to read. Judging by lottery results I’ve seen printed in newspapers, it probably consists of nothing but a list of the numbers on the lottery tickets with indications of which won how much money, if any. Maybe also the text of the law authorizing this new way of raising money.
In reporting on this news, Universal Hub added a link to this article about the 1744/45 Massachusetts lottery from the fine Colonial Currency webpages at Notre Dame. The Ephemera Society offers another view. And twelve years ago Neal E. Millikan published his thorough study Lotteries in Colonial America.
2 comments:
Judging by the date of the drawing, I am wondering if the Province wasn't using the lottery to raise funds to cover the costs associated with its ongoing Louisbourg adventure (as luck would have it, the fortress capitulated less than two weeks later).
Yes, the Louisbourg expedition was definitely part of the province’s cash crush at this time. And the Crown’s eventual payment for that expedition was immensely important in shaping the local economy.
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