Tea Burning on Marshfield Town Green, 26 Nov.

On Sunday, 26 November, a bevy of organizations—Historic Winslow House, Revolution250, the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, and Old Town Trolley Tours—will commemorate the burning of tea in Marshfield.

The “Revolution Brewing” event will feature a sestercentennial reenactment on the town green, with parking available at town hall. The schedule comes in three phases.

2:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Welcoming proclamation, fife & drum music, the march of the local militia, and a mock drill eighteenth-century games for children. Hot chocolate will be available for purchase.

3:00 to 4:00 P.M.
Locals portray Whigs and Loyalists debating the historical events that led to the crisis over tea at the end of 1773. As I’ve written, Marshfield was pretty evenly split between friends of the royal government and their opponents. Therefore, unlike in most places—and particularly in, say, a Boston or Lexington town meeting—men and women on both sides did feel free to speak their minds.

At the end of this hour, the radical Whigs will burn tea to show their solidarity with the mysterious figures who destroyed the East India Company cargos in Boston, and with all those North American boycotting tea to protest Parliament’s tax on it.

4:00 to 5:00 P.M.
Presentation on the aftermath of the tea crisis and what would lie ahead for Marshfield in 1774. The town became the only territory in modern Massachusetts outside of Boston that the royal authorities controlled at the start of the war.

Folks are invited to bring loose tea to be burned or sent to Boston to be dumped into the harbor in the 16 December reenactment of the Boston Tea Party.

TOMORROW: Back to the historical inquiry.

[The photo above comes from a recent tea burning in Lexington. That town has been reenacting its tea-burning for a few years now while Marshfield is doing it especially for this anniversary year. I’ll be running info on Lexington’s 2023 event soon.]