Looking for Elijah Houghton
This event, shown here, was part of the museum’s campaign to mark all the graves of people known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party.
My immediate reaction when I read that news was, of course, what evidence shows that Elijah Houghton participated in the Boston Tea Party?
In the first three decades of the 1800s, newspapers in Boston and elsewhere mentioned men’s connections to the destruction of the tea after they died—usually not before.
Benjamin Bussey Thacher included a collected list of tea destroyers at the back of his 1835 book Traits of the Tea Party. I shared that list and analyzed it back at Boston 1775’s first Tea Party anniversary.
In 1884, Francis S. Drake wrote Tea Leaves, profiling all the Tea Partiers he could identify based on previous reports and family traditions, which were often flimsy or even outright unreliable.
And Elijah Houghton’s name doesn’t appear in any of those sources.
I found a report that Elijah Houghton’s name surfaced in a supplement that the Boston Globe published in 1973, two hundred years after the Tea Party. I don’t know what evidence that publication pointed to.
The contemporaneous record tells us that Elijah Houghton was born in the town of Harvard on 2 June 1739, son of Thomas and Mariah Houghton. The following month, his father had him baptized across the town line in Lancaster.
On 9 June 1766, soon after turning twenty-seven, Elijah Houghton married Mercy Whitney in Harvard. They had their first child, Thomas, a little more than seven months later. Ten more children are named in the town’s baptismal records: Elijah, Jr. (born in 1769), Abraham (1771), Moriah (1772), Mercy (1774), second Abraham (1777), Elisabeth (1779), Hannah (1781), Allice (1784), second Hannah (1786), and Sally (1788).
There’s no question that Elijah Houghton marched out of Harvard during the Lexington Alarm of April 1775. He served five days in Capt. Joseph Fairbanks’s militia company.
As for later in the war, there were multiple men named Elijah (or Elisha) Houghton enlisting from Massachusetts over the years, including one from neighboring Lancaster and two who lived long enough to apply for pensions. None of those Elijah Houghtons was linked to Harvard. And given the way Mercy Houghton kept having children at regular intervals, her husband probably wasn’t away from home for long.
When Elijah Houghton died in his home town in 1819, the local records identified him as “Elijah, s. of Thomas and Meriah, July 20, 1819, a. 80 y. 1 m. 18 d.” and as a Revolutionary War soldier. Mercy had died two years before.
Does it seem likely that Elijah Houghton participated in the Tea Party? That would mean a thirty-four-year-old farmer from Harvard, father of three children under age six, traveled forty miles and inserted himself into the Boston Whigs’ top-secret operation. I’d need to see strong evidence to believe that. Perhaps it’s out there, but I haven’t come across any sign of it.
The list of participants on the Tea Party Ships and Museum’s website doesn’t offer details about Houghton or when and why he was included. The institution appears to be casting a very wide net to ensure no possible Tea Party participants are left out before the event’s Sestercentennial.
TOMORROW: Or do we mean Elisha Horton?
11 comments:
If the operators of the Boston Tea Party Ships & "Museum" had any sense, they'd put you on retainer to fact check each and every one of the folks whose graves they are planning on marking.
But it sounds like they are more about hoopla than hard evidence...
I think the museum staff inherited a very inclusive list, and they’re now focused on finding those people’s graves and arranging for these ceremonies rather than second-guessing it. Those markers expand awareness of the Boston Tea Party, which serves the Sestercentennial commemorations and, of course, the museum.
I think sharing the evidence that those people participated in the Tea Party would be equally interesting to the public, even if it raises questions of how reliable the identifications are.
I tried to dig out my copy of that Boston Globe supplement from 1973. Alas, I couldn't find it, probably still buried in a box; the last time I saw it was a couple of moves ago.
There were 4 supplements in that series, issued 1973-1976, and the Globe compiled them all, reformatted the text into a hardcover book, minus some of the illustrations: "America Rebels" by John Harris, published by the Globe Newspaper Co. in 1976. And I was able to locate my copy of that book.
On pages i-iv is a list of 119 names of Tea Party participants, presumably copied directly from the original newspaper supplement. Neither Elijah Houghton nor Elisha Horton appears on that list. The only similar last name is John Hooton. The only similar first name is Elisha Story.
John Harris's work, in those newspaper supplements and in that "America Rebels" compilation, is still one of my favorite sources on Boston's role in the Revolution. Although there are no footnotes or other citations, my experience has been that it is impeccably researched and a masterful retelling of the story. It got me interested in the subject, nearly 50 years ago, and has been an inspiration for my own work over the years. It's a pity that it isn't better known.
Following up on my earlier comment: A bit of web research leads me to a list of Tea Party participants, which seems to have originated at a site called Massachusetts Genealogy Trails, .
That site notes — pay attention to the punctuation — "This list of 175 names was compiled from Boston Tea Party Chapter, Daughters of American Revolution; from the 1973 Boston Globe 200th Anniversary Boston Tea Party Special Section; and the book, Tea Leaves, published in 1884 in Boston by Francis S. Drake[.]"
Since Houghton's name wasn't in either Tea Leaves or the Globe special section, it presumably came from the DAR chapter.
The Boston Tea Party Chapter, Daughters of American Revolution was founded in 1895; it's still active and has a web site, . But there is no list of Tea Party participants posted on their website, nor is there any reference to any list that they may have compiled earlier.
Further research led to a list compiled by thar DAR Chapter and published in the December 1900 issue of the American Monthly Magazine, which was the national DAR's official magaxine at that time. There were also a few additional names published in the same magazine for February 1902. Again, neither Elijah Houghton nor Elisha Hooton, nor any similar name, appears in those lists.
I'm afraid that's all the time I have for research tonight.
Thanks, Charles Bahne, for the report on what the Boston Globe published. You’ve praised John Harris’s work before, and I’ve seen it only in library collections. I now guess the reference to the Globe in regard to Elijah Houghton that I saw on the web was in error.
The path to Houghton’s name indeed appears to lead through the D.A.R. Perhaps that Boston chapter published an even longer list of participants sometime around the Bicentennial. But where?
I’ve found a 2010 book that refers to a list of 168 names on the website of the “Massachusetts Daughters of the American Revolution.” (Also a 2007 book that says the Massachusetts D.A.R. had assembled a list 175 names long, “though much of the information is based on family histories, which may not be accurate.”)
MassDAR.org doesn’t appear to have such a list today, but perhaps the Wayback Machine has preserved a past page. My early probes haven’t found one yet.
Forgot to post the Boston Tea Party Chapter's website:
https://www.bostonteapartydar.org
Bingo! Back when tables ruled the internet, the Boston Tea Party Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution offered this list of Tea Party participants: https://web.archive.org/web/20021009120512/http://members.aol.com/massdar/Massachusetts_DAR/tp_hist.htm.
It included Elijah Houghton. It also included the known fraud David Kinnison. It did not include any evidence for the names listed. Which suggests there was an earlier, uncited source.
The Massachusetts D.A.R. webpage above was last archived by the Wayback Machine in 2008.
The listing on the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum website improved on that list (whatever its original source) in several ways: several corrected spellings, a few additional names, and more detail about most of the men.
Nonetheless, the museum listing includes men like David Kinnison, whose lies in Chicago have been exposed many times; Thomas Machin, a soldier in the British army until July 1775; and Dr. Thomas Young, quite possibly an organizer of the event but seen by hundreds of people at Old South Meetinghouse while it was going on.
There is marker coming for the sole Salem "participant", the Reverend John Prince: could you advise as to veracity of his "observation"?
John Prince‘s name appears on the first published list of Tea Party participants from 1835. However, Tea Leaves reported that he told Benjamin Russell of the Columbian Centinel that he had observed the destruction of the tea but didn’t take part in the action. The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum lists Prince as a participant in the event but reports that he only watched.
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