“The Detestable Tea”: The Greenough Family and the Boston Tea Party

Join the JP Tuesday Club and the Jamaica Plain Historical Society for this wonderful talk.

Before the American Revolution, friends and neighbors—and even family members—sometimes found themselves on opposite sides in the debate over whether to resist the regulations and taxes imposed by the British government.  In 1773, brothers David and John Greenough (the Greenough family later were the owners of the Loring-Greenough House) found themselves embroiled in a bitter controversy—the boycott of tea imported by the East India Company—that led to the Boston Tea Party. 

In December 1773, John Greenough, then a store keeper and schoolteacher in Wellfleet, bought tea salvaged from the William, a ship that went ashore on Cape Cod while bringing “the detestable tea” to Boston.  This placed him in direct conflict with his neighbors, his town, and his family in Boston where his father and brother were active in the movement to resist Royal authority.

In his diary, John Adams called the Boston Tea Party, a “magnificent Movement…so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible…that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History,” but individuals living in Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution had to balance their personal interests with the shared interests of their families and communities. 

Our speaker is Peter Drummey, a resident of Jamaica Plain and the Stephen T. Riley Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society where the Greenough family papers now are housed, will discuss how the Boston Tea Party affected the Greenough family, who later would play an important role in the history of Jamaica Plain.