MEETING-HOUSE LOTTERIES. 437 By the system, churches and parsonages were built and re- paired, bridges, streets, and highways were constructed, market houses and school-houses built, school and church funds secured, manufactures encouraged, and rivers and har- bors cleared for commerce. In England the British Museum and Westminster Bridge were built by funds obtained by lotteries, and the Congregational, Baptist, and Episcopal Churches in Rhode Island were frequently the agents in lottery schemes, although they had been denounced as early as 1699, by an assembly of ministers at Boston, as "cheats and their agents pillagers of the people." Barrington waited forty years before a lottery was applied for, and the first record of a petition for a lottery appears in the Acts and Resolves of the General Assembly, under date of August, 1772. "Whereas, divers of the Inhabitants of the Town of Bar- rington preferred a Petition, and represented unto this As- sembly, that the Congregational Meeting House in said town is very much out of Repair ; that the laying out Three Roads, one to the Southward, and Two to the Westward of the Said Meeting House, will greatly accommodate the Inhabitants and Travellers towards Fuller's Ferry and the said Meeting House: And that their Circumstances are such they cannot effect the same without the interposition of this Assembly : And therefore prayed this Assembly to grant them a Lottery, "upon such scheme as the Managers shall think proper, to raise the sum of One Hundred and Sixty-Five pounds lawful money : One Hundred and Ten pounds thereof to be appro- priated towards repairing said Meeting House and the Re- mainder towards opening or laying out the said Highways : And that James Browne, Josiah Humphrey, Nathaniel Mar- tin, Samuel Allen and Edward Bosworth, Esquires, may be appointed Managers of said Lottery." It was therefore enacted that the prayer be granted and the Lottery be al- lowed. Fuller's Ferry referred to was the ferry over the Seekonk
