Toward the close of the period, advertisements of lotteries
occupied much space in the newspapers. In most cases these
lotteries were conducted not for personal gain, but for village
and city improvement. Especially interesting to-day are those
advertisements which announced lotteries for the benefit of
churches and colleges. If these advertisements were truthful,
and there is no reason to suppose they were otherwise, lot-
teries equipped the libraries of our higher institutions of learn-
ing, remodeled houses of worship, put bells in the steeples of
churches, repaired roads, erected bridges over rivers, and did many
other things for which communities to-day are commonly taxed.
An advertisement in The Virginia Gazette showed that a local church had gone into the wholesale tobacco business and was evidently trying to market through the columns of the press the nicotia leaves turned in by parishioners in payment for subscrip- tions to the rector's salary.
Benjamin Franklin has already been mentioned as an able writer of advertisements. An excellent example of his work will be found in an advertisement which he wrote for George Wash- ington, inserted in the first number of The Maryland Journal and The Baltimore Advertiser, which William Goddard brought out on Friday, August 20, 1773. Most vividly did Franklin tell how Washington, "having obtained patents for upwards of twenty thousand acres of land on the Ohio and Great Kanhawa Rivers," was going to lease sections upon moderate terms a number of years rent free provided settlers cleared, fenced, tilled, laid down good grass for meadow, and set out at least fifty good fruit trees. Franklin did not hesitate to add for Washington this con- cluding bit of comment :
And it may not be amiss further to observe, that if the scheme for establishing a new government on the Ohio, in the manner talked of, should ever be affected, these must be among the most valuable lands in it, not only on account of the goodness of soil, and the other advan- tages above enumerated, but from their contiguity to the seat of gov- ernment, which more than probable will be fixed at the mouth of the Great Kanhawa.
This advertisement, it may be remarked incidentally, was ex- ceedingly profitable to Washington.
