Time for tea and history at Poricy Park program pays tribute to women of Revolutionary era

Time for tea and history at Poricy
Park program pays
tribute to women of Revolutionary era

veronica yankowski Katrina Richter, of Freehold, samples a cup of tea during a Boston Tea Party commemoration at Poricy Park, Middletown.

When British rule became intolerable, Colonial women did their part to further the cause of independence. They gave up their finery and put aside steeping tea leaves, preferring instead to help brew a revolution.

"Serving tea for a very long time was a woman’s domain, and it was an opportunity to express yourself," explained Maureen O’Connor Leach, of Freehold Township, public program coordinator at Poricy Park in Middletown. "The 18th-century boycott was an opportunity for women to say, ‘We’re not going to put up with this.’ They refused to serve tea in the home, and they also stopped wearing imported fabrics. It was a grassroots movement.

"Women had a lot to do with it because they were willing to throw away their silks and wear homespun," she added. "They decided not to use British products and not to drink tea. It was very much a women’s movement."

Leach and a group of interpreters held a tea party recently at the park’s Murray Farmhouse to commemorate the 226th anniversary of another tea party — one that set the stage for the American Revolution.

"It must have been quite an event, because all business stopped in Boston. Everybody came to the wharf," Leach explained of the protest by 5,000 colonists against British taxation.

According to Leach, the partisan Sons of Liberty had refused to allow a cargo of tea to be unloaded from three ships and asked the governor to send the ships back to England.

"The negotiations went on for a while; then it’s reported that a merchant named Rowe said, ‘I wonder how this tea would mix with salt water?’ Suddenly came these war whoops, and a group of men appeared dressed as Indians, and the crowd followed," Leach recounted.

What unfolded over the next three hours on Dec. 16, 1775, was the Boston Tea Party, during which 342 chests of Darjeeling tea, worth more than £10,000, were dumped into the Boston harbor to protest the British tariff on tea sold to colonists.

To mark the anniversary on Dec. 16, Leach, Penny Ticehurst of Shrewsbury and Katrina Richter of Freehold stepped into roles as Colonial women, dressed in Colonial garb, and chatted over cups of "Liberty Tea," re-creating a scene that might have taken place beside many a Colonial hearth.

The program featured tastings of herbal infusions brewed by the colonists as substitutes, like Liberty Tea, which was a mix of five seasonings, including lemon balm, rosehips, peppermint, spearmint and raspberry.

The uprising at Boston wasn’t the end of the protests over the Tea Act of 1773 — many colonies had their own protest, Leach explained.

"The news spread quickly, and within a week, the Polly sailed into port in Philadelphia," she recounted. "One account said 8,000 people assembled at the wharf and refused to let the ship dock. They threatened to tar and feather the British captain, and he left. The message got out: ‘Don’t try to deliver tea.’ "

In New Jersey, when the Greyhound docked at Greenwich in Cumberland County, then the state’s largest city, its cargo of tea was surreptitiously taken off the ship by the British and placed in a warehouse. On Dec. 22, a band of men dressed as Indians found the tea, piled it up in the town square and lit a bonfire.

"As late as 1776," Leach said, "there are reports of ships coming into Sandy Hook with a cargo of tea that were not allowed in."

While Edenton, N.C., didn’t have its own "tea party," the townswomen took the lead by getting together and signing a pledge to continue the tea boycott, according to Leach. It was a bold act for the Colonial women; many were the wives of prominent men, and the event was titled "Edenton Ladies Tea Party."

The tea boycott had a lasting effect on tea drinking in the colonies. Tea consumption fell from 900,000 pounds in 1769 to 237,000 pounds following the boycott, Leach noted, adding that tea consumption never rebounded, with coffee becoming the more popular beverage thereafter.

"It truly was not the money," observed Leach, adding that the three-pence-per-pound tax on tea was a modest amount and was less than that imposed in England. "It was a pivotal act that started the ball rolling because the other colonies had to decide whether they would stand with them or pay the tax."

It seems fitting that the Boston Tea Party program was held beside the hearth in the Colonial home of Joseph Murray, an activist and patriot, whose dream of leading a peaceful farmer’s life was interrupted by the War for Independence. The farm remained in the Murray family until 1861 and was actively farmed until 1971.

According to Leach, the farmhouse was restored in 1981 and the barn in 1978. Both are used for public and school programs.

"They didn’t realize these were 18th-century buildings. The barn and farmhouse date to 1770. They peeled away the layers and discovered this was not just another building. Murray was a modest farmer and patriot, and this was a middling sort of house in situ," she explained. "He had 40 acres, and that was a small farm. It took about 50 acres to keep you going, and we don’t often get to see how the average person lived.

"The Murray Farmhouse is a fine house, with three usable floors. I tell the children who come here that this is probably how we would have lived," she said.

"We continue to use the house, so it was adaptively restored," added Leach, an attorney who studies history from the perspective of women and the domestic arts.

The Boston Tea Party program was part of a weekly Sunday in the Park series for families initiated by Leach. The next program, "Tea-Lover’s Tea," will be held Sunday, Feb. 10 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at the farmhouse. Tea and refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 for members; $15 for nonmembers. Registration is required by Feb. 7.

"I came to Poricy because the park had a hands-on, interactive approach," Leach said. "At our school programs, kids make cookies and bake them, churn butter, grind spices. Our mission is to provide hands-on educational programs on natural science, the environment and Colonial living to the community.

"As a history buff, I knew Dec. 16 was the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and there’s a resurgence of interest in tea," explained Leach, who gives lectures on tea history and considers herself a tea historian. "Colonial ladies weren’t serving tea in the parlor, so what were they serving? They drank things of their own making, herbal infusions like New Jersey tea made with berries and linden tea made with parts of the linden tree.

"Gradually we lost our taste for tea," Leach commented on the change brought about by the tea boycott. "After the war, Americans never resumed their love affair with it."

The resolve of Colonial women to forgo the pleasures of tea drinking in the cause of liberty is apparent in "A Lady’s Adieu to Her Tea Table,"* an anonymous poem, which Leach recited at the tea party’s end:

"Farewell the tea-board with your gaudy attire,

Ye cups and ye saucers that I did admire;

To my cream pot and tongs I now bid adieu;

That pleasure’s all fled that I once found in you…

Liberty’s the Goddess that I do adore,

And I’ll maintain her right until my last hour,

Before she shall part I will die in the cause,

For I’ll never be govern’d by tyranny’s laws."

For further information about park programs, call (732) 842-5966.

*A Handbook of the American Wing (1924); Web site of Centre d’histoire de Montreal