“Tea which Lot Cheever shook out of his shoe”

Here’s another in the seemingly endless tales of tea surviving from the Boston Tea Party.

The earliest sign of this tea I’ve found is an article in the 7 Nov 1864 Boston Evening Transcript:

Some of the Tea not Thrown Overboard. After the tea was thrown overboard in Boston harbor, Feb 10th, 1774 [sic], one of the party engaged in that movement, Lot Cheever, whose direct descendants now reside in Salem, stopped at the house of Col. Abner Cheever in Saugus to change his disguise. Some of the tea then in his shoes was saved by an old lady of the family, and has from that time until now been carefully preserved.

A lady of the highest respectability and a direct descendant of the Cheever here spoken of, has presented to the manager of the Salem Table at the Naval Fair at Boston a remaining portion of the tea, which will be offered for sale.

The Naval Fair was a fundraiser for sailors in the U.S. Navy, then engaged in quelling another rebellion.

The famous Boston Tea Party didn’t take place 250 years ago this February, and neither did the less famous second Boston Tea Party. No previous source links Lot Cheever to that action. (A Bostonian named Ezekiel Cheever was one of the volunteers patrolling the docks starting in late November.)

In fact, the only man named Lot Cheever I’ve found in the Revolutionary period lived in Danvers. It makes little sense for a man from that far away to take part in destroying the tea in Boston on 16 Dec 1773. It makes even less sense that such a man would travel all the way from Boston to Saugus before removing his disguise.

Incidentally, the man that newspaper story called “Col. Abner Cheever” was only eighteen years old in 1773. He family home was in Lynn, evidently the part of that town which became Saugus in 1815.

People must have realized that some details of that family lore made no sense because over the following decades it evolved to come closer to the standard story.

In 1878 Horace E. Scudder wrote in his novel/travelogue The Bodleys on Wheels about the main characters visiting the East India Marine Hall in Salem and seeing “a little packet of tea which Lot Cheever shook out of his shoe after he had been at the Boston Tea-party.”

A correspondent to St. Nicholas magazine in 1893 described seeing at the Essex Institute in Salem “two bottles of the tea that was thrown over board at the Boston tea-party,—it was found in the shoes of Lot Cheever after removing his disguise.”

That same year, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the historical exhibits inside the U.S. pavilion included:

Tea in Bottle
Which was found in the boots of Col. Abner Cheever, of the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1775 [sic], when changing his disguise after the affair was over. Loaned and collected by Dr. D. W. Cheever, Boston, Mass.

Lot Cheever was thus erased from the story. In 1888 the Essex Institute reported that it had received a “pocket-book of Col. Abner Cheever of the Boston Tea Party.”  

The longest presentation appeared in Lynn in the Revolution (1909), in the entry on Abner Cheever:

Family tradition says that he took part in the famous Boston Tea Party. His grand-niece, Miss Rachel Cheever, of Saugus, has still in her possession a small phial of tea which, it is said, he brought away from the party in his shoes.

Many of the older people remember the venerable patriot who was known as Colonel Cheever in his latter days. He was a tall man, rather thin in face, and smooth-shaven in accordance with the old-time custom. He was the last survivor but one in Saugus of the battle of Lexington. He died September 13, 1837, aged eighty-two, and was first interred in a private tomb which had been built upon his estate, but some few years ago his remains were transferred to the new Saugus cemetery and buried in the Perley lot. A marble stone and marker of the S.A.R. were erected at his grave in 1903.

Because one sample of tea can easily be divided, it’s possible there were multiple small containers of tea from the Cheever family on display in the late 1800s. These sources speak of “a little packet,” “two bottles,” one “Bottle,” and “a small phial.” These could all be separate items, or the family might have retrieved tea they loaned to various displays.

Might any of these tea samples survive today? The most likely depository would be the Peabody Essex Museum, successor of the East India Marine Hall and Essex Institute. But the last reports of the tea said samples were owned by “Dr. D. W. Cheever” and “Miss Rachel Cheever.”

(The photo of the Abner Cheever pocket-book above appeared in volume 5 of Elroy McKendree Avery’s A History of the United States and Its People [1908].)