Old South Meeting House - prelude to the Boston Tea Party

Old South Meeting House at 310 Washington Street was the location of the large public meeting on December 16, 1773 where colonists debated how to respond to the shipment of taxed tea; that meeting directly preceded participants boarding ships and dumping tea into Boston Harbor. The building served as a central gathering place for colonial political discourse and later became a museum interpreting the events surrounding the Boston Tea Party and colonial-era commerce in tea. Today the site interprets both the political and food-related history of tea in colonial Boston.