Old South Meeting House
The meeting here on December 16, 1773, ended in the Boston Tea Party
The story
Before you is the Old South Meeting House, built by a Puritan congregation in 1729. Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706 in the congregation’s earlier meeting house on this site. Phillis Wheatley, the first published Black poet in America, was a member. As revolution approached, people came here to argue about the most pressing questions: the Boston Massacre, and the British navy forcing American sailors into its service. On the sixteenth of December 1773, as many as five thousand people packed in here. They did not want taxed tea landed in the town. Negotiations with the royal government went on for hours and came to nothing. Soon some hundred and fifty men, their faces blackened with soot and dressed in rough imitations of Indigenous clothing, headed for Griffin’s Wharf, where the tea ships lay. Over several hours they destroyed three hundred and forty-two chests of tea. That was the Boston Tea Party. The British Crown called it treason. By the summer of 1774 London had closed the port of Boston and cut back the colony’s self-government, and less than a year later war broke out. When British troops occupied Boston, they took revenge on this building: they ripped out the pews and turned it into a riding school for the cavalry. The congregation came back only in 1783. A century later it moved to a new neighborhood, and the old meeting house was about to be torn down. Citizens saved it, among them the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Julia Ward Howe. It has been a museum since 1877.
Visiting
310 Washington Street, near State and Downtown Crossing subway stations. There is an entrance fee; opening hours at revolutionaryspaces.org. The main floor and lower level are wheelchair accessible.
Photos
Sources
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