Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. There’s a big re-enactment going on in Boston today, but who wants to fight the crowds who will show up to watch (not me). As a replacement for fighting the crowds, here’s a little history about our town’s connection to the Tea Party. This is from E. Victor Bigelow’s 1898 book A Narrative History of Cohasset (p.284):
“It is no small honor that three of our young men [from Cohasset] were among those who boarded the vessels in that last manly endeavor to maintain the bulwarks of fundamental human justice.
“The oldest was Jared Joy, of Beechwood, then twenty-four years of age and afterwards a soldier of the Revolution. His tombstone is in the Beechwood Cemetery, where he was buried in his forty-third year, receives annual decoration at the hands of the grand Army.
“The second was Abraham Tower, twenty years of age, the grandfather of our current town treasurer, and after the Revolution owner of a large commerce at the Cove.
“The third was James Stoddard, a lad of seventeen, afterwards ‘major’ in the local militia. The bits of tea which lodged in his clothing and shoes were scattered upon the floor at his boarding house in Boston the next morning, and caused him no little alarm lest he might be discovered and punished. But honor and not punishment is now measured to all three of these Cohasset boys….”
I especially like the anecdote about James Stoddard. It gives insight both into Stoddard’s emotional state, and insight into the real possibility of punishment for those who participated in the Tea Party.