An Oregon county pays its share of a Boston Tea Party debt - October 19th, 1961

Published Oct 19, 2022, 9:00 AM

On this day in 1961, a London tea company accepted a check for $1.96 as partial compensation for the Boston Tea Parties.

The Day in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to this Day in History Class, a show that proves it's never too late to make history. I'm Gabelusier, and today we're talking about the time when a group of Oregon residents paid a long overdue bill for tea that had been thrown into a harbor nearly two hundred years earlier. The day was October nineteenth, nineteen sixty one. A London tea company accepted a check for one dollar and ninety six cents as partial compensation for the Boston tea parties. The money was collected from seventeen residents of Jackson County, Oregon, and handed over to a representative of the Davison Newman t firm. The company was one of several British team merchants whose goods were thrown into the Boston Harbor during the American Revolution. At the time, the company's founders had sought restitution from King George the Third for four hundred and eighty pounds, but their request when ignored and they never recovered the damages. One hundred and eighty seven years later, That injustice still didn't sit right with the residents of one Oregon County, who they decided to do their small part to make things right at last. After adjusting for inflation, they determined that Davison Newman were owed four thousand, nine hundred and sixty six dollars for the long lost shipment. They divided that figure by the then current population of the United States, and then calculated the proportionate share of Jackson County residents. That sum only amounted to a dollar ninety six, but the company appreciated the gesture all the same. Leslie Simons, the then current director of the Davison Newman Tea Company, said, quote, the government never gave us a peep. Bostonians simply smiled. But Jackson County, oh, they are fine folk. The first and most famous Boston tea party took place on December sixteenth, seventeen seventy three, in Boston Harbor. That night, under the cover of darkness, a group of sixty or so colonists disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and sneaked aboard three British tea ships. These sons of Liberty, as they called themselves, used axes to smash open three hundred and forty two wooden tea chests, property of the British East India Company. They then proceeded to hurl that tea overboard, all forty six tons of it. Contrary to popular belief, the Sons of Liberties midnight raid was not a protest of a high tax on tea. In fact, just the opposite. The British government had tried to prop up the floundering East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade, but when Dutch traders began to smuggle in tea at a lower price, Parliament responded by passing the Tea Act of seventeen seventy three. That bill greatly reduced the tax on tea paid by the East India Company, allowing it to undercut its competitor's prices and effectively reclaim its monopoly. The bill also empowered the East India Company to sell tea directly in the American colonies, cutting out the colonial merchants who had previously acted as distributors. That loss in revenue wasn't taken too kindly, and the Tea Act became yet another example of the British government overreaching its authority. The colonists. Anger came to a head with the Boston Tea Party on December sixteenth, but it didn't stop there. In the months that followed, many other seaports held tea parties of their own, and on March seventh, seventeen seventy four, Boston staged its second such event. It was on that occasion that sixt chests of fine tea belonging to the Davison Newman Company were broken open and thrown into the waters of Boston Harbor. The company's founders, monk House Davison and Abraham Newman, kept scrupulous records of every shipment they made. They presented that evidence to George the Third and asked to be reimbursed for the four hundred and eighty pound loss of their tea, but the Crown declined to pay. The firm lost hundreds more cases of tea and other such incidents, but the appeals for those claims were similarly rejected, and so it went for seven generations of the company until nineteen sixty one, when a Jackson County delegation decided to make amends. The campaign was spearheaded by a missus Bert Free and was endorsed by the mayor of Medford, the largest city in Jackson County, Oregon. On October nineteenth, nineteen sixty one, Mrs Free presented a check for one dollar and ninety six cents to Leslie Simmons, the director and spokesperson of Davison Newman. The money was accompanied by a letter of explanation from Medford Mayor J. W. Snyder. In his note, Snyder apologized for the behavior of his East Coast ancestors, saying that in those days the region quote could hardly be considered civilized. He added that the people of Jackson County, on the other hand, were quote highly civilized and willing to pay up. For his part, Leslie Simons hoped the gesture would inspire other Americans to finally pony up for the Sons of Liberties Bill. In a public statement, he said, quote, we are very grateful to the good people of Jackson County. Now we are waiting to hear from the rest of Oregon's counties and from the other forty nine states. Davison Newman and Company never received another direct payment from the public, but the company continued to operate for the rest of the twentieth century and even into the twenty one. For many decades, it stayed in business by selling only a single brand, a blend of Salon and Darjeeling tea s from India, which the company dubbed Boston Harbor T. So, even though the company only received a small symbolic form of restitution from one county in Oregon, it made a small fortune by cashing in on the notoriety of the Boston tea parties. Doing so required a bit of creativity, though, as you can't legally register the name Boston Harbor as a brand, the solution, according to Leslie Simons, was to bastardize it by making a sound alike name. Hence, if you track down a bag of Davis and Newman's now discontinued tea, you'll find the official registered name printed in small letters beneath the words Boston Harbor T. It's spelled b A W S T O N A b A for as the locals might say, Boston Harbor. I'm Gabe Louzier and hopefully you now know a little more about history today than you did yesterday. You can learn even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at T D I HC. Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions, or you want to tell me how bad my fake Boston accent was, you can send that my way at this day at I heart media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day in history class.