I learned about another eighteenth-century “tea party” today. Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell investigates what may be the first use of the word “tea party” to describe the revolutionary-era destruction of East India Tea. Apparently a group of patriots in Lyme, CT destroyed a shipment of 58 boxes of tea in March 1774, about four months after the famed Boston Tea Party.
These kind of copy-cat were not unusual. As some of my readers know, I have been piddling away on a book about a similar event that happened in December 1774 in the south Jersey town of Greenwich.
But what is unusual is the fact that this event was referred to by the residents of Lyme as a “tea party” as early as 1805. According to most historians, the destruction of British tea in response to the Tea Act was not called a “tea party” until the 1830s.
The event in Greenwich has always been called a “tea burning” (because they burned the tea and did not dump it in the river), but there is no reference (after the event occurred in 1774) to the event in any extant writings–public or private– until 1839. (Actually, it was referred to as a “tea party” in the 1870s. A group of Victorian women sponsored a literal “tea party” in order to raise funds to help promote the Philadelphia Centennial and they used the event in Greenwich as a way to get local residents to contribute).
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