The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page.It’s a foundational American story: Colonists angry about a despised tax storm aboard a vessel at anchor and empty chests of tea overboard in a bold act of defiance. These details could describe the Boston Tea Party, but they’re also the basic play-by-play of an act of civil disobedience much closer to home — the only known protest of its kind in Virginia.The Yorktown Tea Party was a far cry from its much flashier namesake. This local revolt was smaller and occurred nearly 11 months after the fateful night in Boston Harbor, at a time when events ahead of the Revolutionary War were beginning to snowball. But the mischief that materialized in a port town on the York River on November 7, 1774, was nonetheless an important milestone in the march to revolution. That significance is all the reason many modern Yorktown residents need to celebrate — this year and for the foreseeable future — Virginia’s homegrown tea party.Beginning around the middle of the 18th century, tea was a preferred beverage among Americans, a reflection of their cultural Britishness and an increasingly accessible means to signal a middle-class status. Many people regarded tea as a healthful beverage and believed it staved off illness, even heightening “the work of Venus” for the newly betrothed, if one Dutch pamphlet was to be believed. Americans consumed more than a million pounds annually, and possibly twice that, in the late Colonial Era.Tea leaves came from abroad, grown in eastern and southern Asia. The East India Company controlled the trade for Britain, but was in rough financial shape by the 1760s, largely because tea smuggled into the Colonies by Dutch traders undercut profits. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and, later, the Tea Act of 1773, attempted to remedy the company’s financial woes with a tax on tea, but these measures united many Americans under a slogan growing more fervent by the year: no taxation without representation.Americans boycotted tea. They harassed neighbors and Colonial officials who didn’t join them. It all came to a head in December 1773 when Patriots aligned with Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty refused to let crews of three East India Company vessels land their cargo of tea. Many had hoped the ships would turn around without unloading their tea and sail back to England. But the royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, put his foot down. He expected the tea to come ashore and to collect the duties on it.Painting by Robert Reid. Courtesy of Library of Congress. On the night of December 16, more than 100 men, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the vessels and dumped all 342 chests into Boston Harbor. It was a momentous act of defiance, one that hardened King George III’s resolve to tame the hotheaded Colonists and compelled Parliament to pass the Coercive Acts, four measures that punished Massachusetts for its rebelliousness.But if the Boston Tea Party marked a tipping point in Anglo-American relations, it was also a watershed moment for the unity of the Colonies.Shortly after Bostonians tossed East India Company tea into the harbor, a ship laden with nearly 700 chests of tea tried to land at Philadelphia. Patriots there forced the vessel to turn around and return to England. In April 1774, the same thing happened in New York.In fact, “tea parties” happened all over the Colonies, but most did not mirror the events that transpired in Boston. In some cases, revolutionary zeal compelled Patriots to torch the shunned commodity. In Provincetown, Mass., Princeton, N.J. and Annapolis, Md., Americans burned tea rather than see it made into a beverage.“We can see the tea parties all as an intercolonial movement where some Colonists, the ones we would consider the most ardent Sons of Liberty, begin to view tea as a symbol of British encroachment on American rights,” said Benjamin L. Carp, author of “Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America” and a professor of history at the City University of New York. “You are destroying something considered to be a luxury item. It’s not rice that goes to feed hungry mouths.” Other tea parties were protests without any seizure or destruction whatsoever. In tiny Edenton, N.C., 51 women gathered in the home of Elizabeth King and signed a document pledging their loyalty to the Patriot cause, including a boycott of tea.“Women were very often the people who most often influenced their husbands,” said Sarah Meschutt, senior curator of the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. “On the whole, women longed to discuss politics when they were not empowered to play a role in politics.”Among all the varied protests, there were nevertheless a few Boston Tea Party reprises, and Yorktown’s take on public dissent was one of those cases when East India Company tea suffered the same wet fate.“The Inhabitants of York having been informed that the Virginia, commanded by Howard Esten, had on Board two Half Chests of Tea,” reported Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette in November 1774, “went on Board said Ship,” where they, “hoisted the Tea out of the Hold and threw it into the River.”Today, Yorktown is a quiet historic village, much of it owned by the National Park Service as part of Colonial National Historical Park’s Yorktown Battlefield unit. In the 18th century, Yorktown was a bustling port town — the deepest natural harbor on the East Coast, said Mike Steen, chairman of the Yorktown Commemoration Committee, which is planning local events to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial.Yorktown was the primary port in Virginia through about 1760, and even after commerce started to drift toward Hampton Roads, the town remained an important commercial asset, especially because of its proximity to Williamsburg and points west.The tea that arrived aboard the ship Virginia in November 1774 had come from England, shipped by London merchant John Norton, Esquire, and Sons. The leaves were bound for Williamsburg, then Virginia’s Colonial capital, to be sold by local merchant John Prentis.Tossing the tea overboard was one of just a handful of similarities between the tea parties in Boston and Yorktown. Like their northern counterparts, York County’s citizens offered time (however halfheartedly) for a political solution that never arrived. Those who boarded the Virginia, “waited some Time for the Determination of the Meeting of several Members of the House of Burgesses of Williamsburg, who had taken this Matter under Consideration,” the Virginia Gazette reported. When no word came of a last-minute intervention, Virginians threw the tea overboard. What’s more, Patriots who boarded the vessel, like those up north, took care only to destroy tea. Once the tea was in the York River, the Virginians, “returned to Shore without doing Damage to the Ship or any other Part of her Cargo,” according to the Virginia Gazette account.But that’s where the similarities between the distant cousins ended. For starters, the impact of the Yorktown Tea Party did not send the same tremors through Anglo-American relations that the Boston Tea Party had. In the long months that had elapsed, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, and the Continental Congress met and announced a boycott of British goods. In this heightened state of national agitation, the Yorktown Tea Party didn’t carry the same sort of shock value.Most Bostonians who participated in the tea party, at night and in disguise, took the secret to their grave. The Yorktown Tea Party, on the other hand, happened in broad daylight by Virginians who felt no need to hide their identity. By late 1774, Colonists had begun forming local committees of safety at the urging of the Continental Congress. York County’s committee of safety published a resolution in the Virginia Gazette stating that they “highly approve of the Conduct of the Inhabitants of York, in destroying the Tea on Board the Virginia.”Gloucester County’s committee of safety, just across the York River, seemed a little miffed that they were late to the tea party. A number of them, according to committee clerk Jasper Clayton, went to Yorktown’s waterfront but realized the deed was done. “On our Arrival,” Clayton wrote, “we found the Tea had met with its deserved Fate, for it had been committed to the Waves.”Perhaps the most obvious difference was the size of the cargo. Bostonians emptied 342 chests of tea into the harbor, an amount that would easily be worth more than $1 million today. In Yorktown, the casualty list was a mere two half-chests of tea. While that’s a small fraction of the tea destroyed in Boston, it was nevertheless something, according to Carp. The value of the modest amount of tea destroyed at Yorktown, he said, was probably in the neighborhood of what the value of an SUV might be today.But as a symbol of solidarity and resistance, the act of destroying British tea was monumental, according to Meschett. Throwing the tea overboard, as well as the subsequent, detailed newspaper account, had the effect of moving Virginians toward boycott and rebellion. After the Yorktown Tea Party, “hundreds of local merchants came to Williamsburg to sign the Continental Association non-importation agreement,” she said.Want to go?Yorktown Tea FestivalYorktown, Va.Nov. 6-8, 2024Events include guest speakers, special museum exhibitions, tea time and a re-enactment of the Yorktown Tea Party.Cost: $50 per dayMore info: visityorktown.orgTickets: bit.ly/ytteafestivalSteen, of the Yorktown Commemoration Committee, said that history books tend to naturally focus on the all-stars at the expense of all the smaller events that moved the action along. Yorktown is known for the surrender of the British Army, but not the role it had galvanizing Virginians behind the cause of liberty seven years earlier, he said.That’s what Steen hopes locals and visitors will take away from the Yorktown Tea Festival from Nov. 6 to 8, which will feature exhibitions, concerts and, of course, a reenactment of the Yorktown Tea Party.Steen said it’s appropriate — and not a stretch — to honor the significant role that this little-known event had in the birth of the American nation. The dumping of tea into the York River foreshadowed a major and decisive role that the Old Dominion and its citizens would have in eight long years of war and, ultimately, independence. “Virginia played a huge role in the Revolution, and Yorktown was at the center,” he said.Don’t miss another Cardinal 250 storyYou can sign up for our monthly newsletter or any of our other free newsletters below: The Daily Everything we publish, every weekday The Roundup A roundup of our 10 most popular stories each week, sent Saturdays at 7 a.m. Cardinal Weather In-depth weather news and analysis on our region, sent Wednesdays West of the Capital A weekly round-up of politics, with a focus on our region, sent Fridays Your Weekend Spread your wings this weekend with our go-to guide for celebrations, festivities, and other events happening in our region, delivered every Thursday at noon. Cardinal 250 Revisiting stories from our nation’s founding. 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