A Vial of Tea with “a couple of provenances”

Yesterday I discussed three samples of tea that came to Massachusetts museums in the late 1800s, reportedly after men involved in the Boston Tea Party shook those leaves out of their shoes and clothing at the end of the night.

The day before, I discussed three samples of tea that the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris distributed to Massachusetts historical organizations in the early 1800s.

Mason reported that those leaves had been collected from the Dorchester shore the morning after the event, though he didn’t record who did the collecting.

Another sample of tea now in this city comes to us with versions of both stories attached. It’s a vial of liquid tea reportedly brewed from leaves involved in the Tea Party of 1773. The Old North Church owns that artifact, but it’s on loan to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

When the museum put that vial on display in 2018, it issued a press release that said:

The tea, believed to be from The Boston Tea Party, has a couple of provenances.

One allegedly stems from the family of Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842), a Unitarian clergyman who lived in Dorchester, Mass., who, as legend has it, gathered tea as a five-year-old boy when the tea thrown overboard at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773 and was carried by the tide to the beaches of Dorchester Neck Flats. The family purportedly bottled tea in numerous glass vials. Years later, Reverend Harris’ mother, Rebecca Harris (1745-1801), passed a vial of the tea to her daughter Hannah Waite (1780-1845). Since then, the tea (curiously in liquid form) has been passed on numerous times ultimately landing with Old North Church. . . .

Another provenance of the tea, also stemming from the Harris family, was, as legend has it, shaken out of the boot of a participant of The Boston Tea Party on his return home.

Thaddeus Mason Harris’s father, William, died in 1778 while working as paymaster for Col. Henry Jackson’s regiment. His mother, Rebecca (Mason) Harris, married Samuel Wait, Jr., of Malden in 1780. It’s possible Hannah was the first child of that marriage, but the only Hannah Waite listed in Malden’s vital records as born in 1780 was the daughter of another couple.

By that year young Thaddeus was living in other families in Templeton and Shrewsbury, retired ministers who started to prepare him for Harvard College. He kept in touch with his mother, who died in Malden in 1801. Harris was then settled as a minister in Dorchester, and thus might already have come into possession of Boston Tea Party tea. (As I wrote back here, I think it’s quite unlikely Thaddeus picked it up off the shore in 1773, “as legend has it,” since he was a small boy living in another town at the time.)

Alternatively, the stories behind this vial of liquid tea might have been brewed out of the two dominant narratives already established by the late 1800s: that the Rev. Dr. Harris collected some tea, and that some tea came out of a participant’s shoes.

TOMORROW: Orphan samples.