Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents relating to; the shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year; 1773, by the East India Tea Company. (With an introduction,; notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party)Drake, Francis S. (Francis Samuel)
History
Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents relating to; the shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year; 1773, by the East India Tea Company. (With an introduction,; notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party)
Drake, Francis S. (Francis Samuel)
Boston Tea Party, 1773; Tea tax (American colonies)
The names of four members of this family are prominently associated with
the tea episode at Boston. James Pitts, the father, (H.U., 1731,) an
eminent and wealthy merchant, who, as member of the Governor's Council,
thwarted the chief-magistrate, Hutchinson, in his efforts to have the
tea landed, and who died in Dunstable, Mass., January 25, 1776; aged
sixty-four. His sons,--JOHN, born in 1737, (H.U., 1757,) a selectman,
and on the committee to urge the consignees to resign; an active member
of the committee of correspondence, of the Provincial Congress of 1775;
Speaker of the House in 1778, and member of the senate in 1780-84, who
died at Tyngsboro', Mass., in 1815; SAMUEL, born in 1745, an officer in
the company of cadets, said also to have been one of the tea party, and
LENDALL, the leader of the party, noted above, who was clerk of the
market in 1775-6, and an officer in Hancock's cadets. The sons all had
Huguenot blood in their veins, their mother being a sister of James
Bowdoin. All were merchants, and active Sons of Liberty, and prior to
the Revolution, were in business together, engaged in extensive
commercial transactions. Pitts's wharf was just north of Faneuil Hall
Market. Pitts Street perpetuates the name and fame of this noted family;
no one of their descendants bearing the name now surviving in Boston.
The Pitts mansion, a favorite place of meeting for the Boston patriots,
occupied the ground now covered by the Howard Atheneum. The accompanying
portrait of Lendall Pitts is taken from a painting owned by his
grandson, Lendall Pitts Cazeau, of Roxbury.
For many of the above facts I am indebted to the Pitts
"Memorial," by Daniel Goodwin, Jr., of Chicago.
[Illustration: Signature, Lendall Pitts]
THOMAS PORTER,
A merchant, formerly of Boston, died in Alexandria, Va., in June, 1800.
CAPTAIN HENRY PRENTISS,
Born in Holliston, Mass., March 27, 1749, died in Medfield, Mass.,
August 31, 1821; son of Rev. Joshua, forty-five years pastor of the
Holliston church. Captain Prentiss served during the Revolutionary war,
at Cambridge, at Long Island, and at Trenton. He was an Overseer of the
Poor, in Boston, in 1784; a member of the Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company in 1786; a sea captain in 1789, and was afterwards a
merchant of Boston. He, with his brother Appleton, was one of the first
to introduce into New England the art of printing calico,--producing a
coarse blue and red article on India cotton. Their place of business was
at the corner of Buttolph Street. Captain Prentiss' residence was in a
stone house, near the head of Hanover Street, the former residence of
Benjamin Hallowell, Comptroller of Customs, which was ransacked at the
time Gov. Hutchinson's House was mobbed. Member Massachusetts Lodge,
1789.
[Illustration: Signature, Henry Prentiss]
DR. JOHN PRINCE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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