Thaddeus Mason Harris Passing Out Tea

In 1793, a young Harvard graduate named Thaddeus Mason Harris became the minister of the new Unitarian meeting in Dorchester.

Harris had previously been a schoolteacher and a librarian at Harvard College.

He also claimed to have been offered the position of secretary to George Washington, but there’s no evidence of that and the job wasn’t open at the time.

That’s not the only story in Harris’s biography which I find a little suspect, so I’m more skeptical than usual about historical anecdotes or artifacts that come through him.

However, Harris was a co-founder of and longtime volunteer for the American Antiquarian Society, and active in other historical organizations, so he’s hard to avoid. (Joshua R. Greenberg alerted me to Christen Mucher’s article about Harris’s work on Commonplace last month.)

In particular, Harris spread around samples of tea said to have been collected from the Dorchester shore after the Boston Tea Party. He doesn’t appear to have preserved the name of the person who gave him this tea.

Harris’s own name did remain attached to these relics, however, so often people assume he collected the tea himself. He would have been five years old at the time, living with his family in Charlestown, on the other side of Boston from Dorchester. It seems far more likely that one of the minister’s neighbors or parishioners after he settled in Dorchester gave him this tea.

Harris donated some of that tea to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It rests in a glass jar with paper labels that say:

Tea
that was gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck on the morning after the destruction of the three Cargos at Boston
December 17, 1773

Presented by Rev. Dr. Harris

You can play with a curious digital image of that artifact here.

The Dorchester minister gave another sample to the American Antiquarian Society in 1840, two years before he died. That organization describes its treasure as:

Less than five inches high, the mold-blown, pale aqua bottle filled with tea leaves is wrapped at its mouth with twill tape and sealed with red sealing wax. Its attached paper label reads: “Tea Thrown into Boston Harbor Dec. 16, 1773.”

A second label survives in the handwriting of the A.A.S. secretary in the 1860s with text very similar to the M.H.S. bottle and Harris’s name on it.

This past June, Heritage Auctions sold a third small bottle of tea with a paper label. This one says:

“Tea gathered on the shore at Dorchester Neck the morning after the destruction of the three cargoes December 17” 1773. From
Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D.

Rec’d from the American Antiquarian Society, March 1895
F. W. Putnam
Part of a lot in a stone jar found at Ant. Soc. among other things

Frederic Ward Putnam (1839–1915) was an anthropologist, first director of the Peabody Museum in his home town of Salem, and curator at the other Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

That sample of tea, deaccessioned in some way from the A.A.S., was passed down in private hands in the twentieth century. When it was sold in June, it fetched $87,500.

TOMORROW: More tea samples.