Faneuil Hall Lottery

March 29

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (March 29, 1773).

“A LIST OF Blanks & Prizes in Faneuil-Hall Lottery.”

A notice in the March 29, 1773, edition of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy informed the public that “A LIST OF Blanks & Prizes in Faneuil-Hall Lottery, THE LAST, as they are Drawn from Day to Day, may be seen at the Printing-Office in Queen-street.”  A decorative border enclosed the advertisement, lending it greater visibility among the news and several advertisements on the same page.

Throughout the colonies, lotteries funded all sorts of public works projects, including roads, bridges, market houses, and iron works, in the eighteenth century.  Following the destruction of the original Faneuil Hall in 1761, residents of Boston set about rebuilding the marketplace and paid for the project with a series of lotteries that took place over a decade. Newspapers in Boston often carried advertisements that encouraged colonizers to purchase tickets for the current “class” or drawing.  One class featured “F” tickets, with subsequent drawings having tickets for the other letters in “Faneuil” for the drawing held from 1767 through 1771.  The “LIST OF Blanks & Prizes” for 1773 came from another drawing, “THE LAST” of the series of Faneuil Hall lotteries.

Sponsors and managers of other lotteries usually pledged that they would publish a roster of winning tickets and prizes in the public prints.  Doing so simultaneously kept participants informed and held the managers accountable.  Lengthy lists filled entire columns and sometimes entire pages of colonial newspapers.  For the Faneuil Hall Lottery, however, the sponsors opted to avoid the expense of inserting the winning tickets in the newspapers and instead posted the results at the printing office operated by John Green and Joseph Russell, the printers of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy.

That contributed to the printing office’s status as a hub for disseminating information, though not always in print.  Green and Russell, like other printers, served as brokers of all kinds of information that never made it into their newspapers.  They regularly published advertisements that advised the public to “Enquire of the Printers hereof” to learn more.  In the same issue that carried the announcement about the “LIST of Blanks & Prizes,” an employment advertisement placed by a young woman seeking “to go into a small Family” as a cook and housekeeper and another inserted by a colonizer in need of “A MAID … that can be recommended for her … Activity in Household Affairs” both directed readers to contact the printers rather than the advertisers.  Anonymous notices offering enslaved people for sale in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy and other newspapers published in the city also concluded with instructions to “enquire of the printers.”  The arrival of visitors and messages in response to such advertisements, as well as though interested in the results of the Faneuil Hall Lottery, made the printing office a bustling center of information exchange, in print, in handwritten notes, and in conversation.

January 10

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Massachusetts Spy (January 10, 1771).

“AN exact List of Blanks and Prizes in Fanueil-Hall Lottery, to [be] seen at the Printing-Office.”

Printing offices were hubs for disseminating information in eighteenth-century America.  Many were sites of newspaper production, printing and reprinting news, letters, and editorials from near and far.  Many printers encouraged readers and others to submit “Articles of Intelligence” for publication in the colophons that appeared on the final pages of their newspapers.  Every newspaper printer participated in exchange networks, trading newspapers with counterparts in other towns and colonies and then selecting items already published elsewhere to insert in their newspapers.  Newspaper printers also disseminated a wide range of advertising, from legal notices to advertisements about runaway apprentices and indentured servants or enslaved people who liberated themselves to notices marketing consumer goods and services.  In many instances, newspaper advertisements did not include all of the relevant information but instead instructed interested parties to “enquire of the printer” to learn more.  Accordingly, not all of the information disseminated from printing offices did so in print.  Some printers also worked as postmasters.  Letters flowed through their printing offices.  Printers did job printing, producing broadsides, handbills, and pamphlets for customers, further disseminating information at the discretion of their patrons rather than through their own editorial discretion.  Many printers sold books, pamphlets, and almanacs posted subscription notices for proposed publications, and printed book catalogs and auction catalogs.

Yet that was not the extent of information available at early American printing offices.  Colonists could also visit them to learn more about the results of lotteries sponsored for public works projects.  An advertisement in the January 10, 1771, edition of the Massachusetts Spy, for instance, informed readers of “AN exact Lost of Blanks and Prizes in Fanueil-Hall Lottery, to [be] seen at the Printing-Office opposite to William Vassell’s, Esq; the head of Queen-street.”  Other newspapers published in Boston that same week carried the same notice but named “Green & Russell’s Printing-Office.”  The printers of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy also played a role in disseminating information about a lottery that helped to fund a local building project.  Eighteenth-century newspapers sometimes included lottery results, the “Blanks” or ticket numbers and the corresponding prizes, but those could occupy a significant amount of space.  Rather than incur the expense of purchasing that space in newspapers, the sponsors of lotteries sometimes instead chose to deposit that information at printing offices, sites that collected and disseminated all sorts of information via a variety of means.  Printers served as information brokers, but they did not limit their efforts and activities to printed pages dispersed beyond their offices.  Sometimes colonists had to visit printing office or correspond with printers via the post in order to acquire information that did not appear in print.