May 1, 2005

How to Pay for a Steeple

Most Trinity members are aware of the curiosity that the debt for our steeple was not retired until the Vestry petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature for authorization to conduct a lottery. This was facilitated by the fact that Lancaster was the capital of Pennsylvania at the time and our Pastor Muhlenberg was from a family that was very well connected politically. But the details of how the lottery worked are not well known. This is how it was structured.
There were 6000 tickets printed and sold. They had a face value of $3.00 each, making the gross income $18,000. The payout was as follows:
1 prize of $500.
1 prize of $200.
2 prizes of $100.
10 prizes of $50.
20 prizes of $30.
40 prizes of $20.
50 prizes of $10.
2800 prizes of $5.

If you multiply out all of the above, the total amount of the purse was $17,300. The $700 difference between the $18,000 revenue and the payout was used to cover the expenses associated with conducting the lottery – ticket printing, advertising in the newspaper, etc.
The church was authorized to deduct 20 percent from each prize. Twenty percent of the $17,300 prize total equals $3,460. That was Trinity’s portion of the pot.
The odds of winning were actually pretty good - at least by current standards. Remembering that there were 6000 tickets and 2924 prizes, an individual had close to a 50/50 chance of winning something. But that something was most likely $5.00, of which $3.00 was the bettor’s original money. Then the church would deduct 20% or $1.00, leaving a net gain of $1.00. The good news was that, unlike today, there was no income tax.
Originally conceived and authorized by the Vestry in 1783 in the flush of enthusiasm that still remained two years after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, the books on the steeple project were finally closed 24 years later with the success of the lottery in 1807.