A Lucky's convenience store clerk said folks were in as early as 5 this morning to buy tickets for tonight's Powerball drawing.

With lottery fever fueled by an estimated $1.5 billion jackpot, it's not easy to remember Virginians debating whether the state should get into the lottery business, which it did in 1987.

But the history of Virginia, and that of the South, was filled with lotteries as a kind of early GoFundMe, as discussed this week on BackStory -- a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

The story, "A Brief History of American Lotteries," features Civil War scholar and University of Richmond's former president, Ed Ayers, telling the tragic story of William Byrd III, son of the man who founded Richmond in 1737: