Old South Meeting House: Sparks of the Tea Party

Why is it significant?

Look up at the Flemish-bond red bricks and the graceful white steeple of the Old South Meeting House rising above the modern shops of Washington Street.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Look up at the Flemish-bond red bricks and the graceful white steeple of the Old South Meeting House rising above the modern shops of Washington Street. Built in seventeen twenty-nine, this soaring sanctuary was the largest building in colonial Boston, capable of packing more than five thousand people inside its galleries. Whenever a town meeting outgrew Faneuil Hall, furious citizens surged down the street to fill this very hall.

On the cold, drizzly afternoon of December sixteenth, seventeen seventy-three, more than five thousand men and women jammed the wooden pews and aisles. Three merchant ships laden with East India Company tea—the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver—sat anchored in Boston Harbor. Governor Thomas Hutchinson had refused to grant the ships clearance to return to England without unloading their taxed cargo, and midnight was the legal deadline for British customs to seize the cargo by force.

Tension inside the meeting house was suffocating. Samuel Adams stood at the pulpit, conferred with patriot leaders, and announced gravely to the silent assembly. "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country."

That phrase was the secret prearranged signal. Shouts of defiance and piercing war whoops erupted from the gallery. A organized group of the Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as Mohawk warriors with soot on their faces and blankets around their shoulders, sprinted out the doors toward Griffin's Wharf. In three hours of disciplined silence, they smashed open three hundred and forty-two wooden chests and dumped forty-six tons of tea into the saltwater, sparking the American Revolution.

During the siege of Boston in seventeen seventy-five, enraged British soldiers got their revenge. They gutted the interior, ripped out the pews and pulpit for firewood, spread tons of dirt and gravel across the sanctuary floor, and turned this sacred hall of liberty into a riding school for their cavalry regiments.