A Tea Party Walk
Did the participants of the Boston Tea Party expect to be remembered 250 years later?
I am no great historian, nor do I have any grand reflections on the present-day meaning of the Boston Tea Party. I have, however, one advantage over the 250th anniversary contributors from last weekend: I live in Boston (well, Cambridge). And I found myself, on the morning of the 16th, in the heart of the city, catching a train from South Station. That’s only a few thousand feet away from the site of the famous (or infamous) revelry.
So I arrived a little early in order to take a look about and to retrace, if I could, the steps of Sam Adams’ Mohawks. (It turns out I needn’t have hurried because Amtrak, or the station, insists on announcing platforms only ten minutes before departure.) First, I headed north to the Old South Meeting Hall, where Adams and the Sons of Liberty rallied.
It wasn’t far: everything is very close together, by modern standards. Boston had only about 16,000 inhabitants in 1775—still enough to make it the third-largest colonial city. Here’s a map from that time: you can see that the city covered today’s North End, or the tip of the Shawmut Peninsula. (Boston’s geography has changed over the years as parts of the harbor were filled in; here’s an article from National Geographic showing the city’s geographic evolution.)
Here you can see the meeting house. It was originally a Congregational church but is now used for services only once per year. It hosts an annual reenaction of the Tea Party—an especially ostentatious one this year, I hope, though I didn’t stay around to watch.
No one knows exactly where the tea itself was dumped into the harbor. It happened at a place called “Griffin’s Wharf,” which no longer exists. The best guess seems to be a wharf at the base of modern-day Pearl Street, then called Hutchinson Street. The walk from the meeting house down Pearl Street is remarkable for its display of the architectural smorgasbord that renders Boston especially charming. Much like London, it’s a mixture of old and new that’s somehow remarkably easy on the eyes. The meeting house, for example, is not so much ruined by surrounding high-rises as simply nestled among them: they look down upon it protectively.
As we move from the Meeting House toward the river, it’s the modern that dominates. Here’s the John McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, an Art Deco-inspired building from the 1980s.
As you walk a little farther, you see these three brick buildings (the smaller one, the closer one in grey, and the farther one in red). They were built in 1897 or 1898 on Russia Wharf, a hub of Boston’s trade with St. Petersburg. Earlier buildings on the site were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Apparently, the interiors of the two rear buildings were removed to make way for the skyscraper that stands above them, while the facades remain—another good example of how to modernize a city without destroying its historic character.
Then you reach the river and see Boston’s Tea Party Museum, complete with replicas of the Beaver and the Eleanor, two of the ships involved. Both are surprisingly small, around 85 feet (I had expected them to be more like East Indiamen). The ships and museum are very close to the probable location of Griffin’s Wharf, though the precise spot is now probably solid ground, about 500 feet to the northwest. There’s a historical marker nearby, but I didn’t make it so far since I still had a train to catch.
As I went, I couldn’t help wondering what the Sons of Liberty might have thought had they accompanied me as I retraced their steps. In one sense, I suppose they might not have cared. After all, some of them were tea smugglers trying to protect their own profits. They probably did not expect to be remembered in 250 years. Maybe they’d have asked me about the logistics of shipping tea today. (They’d have been glad to know it’s tariff-free.)
But Sam or John Adams might have felt pride, or perhaps awe, to see the powerful pillars of stone and iron that tower above their old meeting house, and then trembled still more upon hearing that this mighty city is now merely the 25th-largest in the nation they helped found that day. It is a reminder to us that our own political actions, including those chosen to advance immediate ends, may live longer than we suppose. In 250 years, they might even adorn the sides of a Boston trolley.
Jonathan Meilaender is a JD candidate at Harvard Law and is concurrently engaged in a Master’s program in German and European studies at Georgetown University. He received his BA in Politics from Saint Vincent College where he was also Editor-in-Chief of the Saint Vincent College Review. @JMeilaender
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