Old South Meeting House

The Old South Meeting House is where the Boston Tea Party started — not the dumping of tea into the harbour, but the meeting on December 16, 1773, where 5,000 furious colonists packed into this building and debated what to do about three ships full of taxed British tea sitting in the harbour. When word came that the governor refused to let the ships leave without paying the duty, Samuel Adams reportedly declared 'This meeting can do nothing more to save the country' — the signal for a mob to head to Griffin's Wharf and dump 342 chests of tea into the water.

The meeting house was built in 1729 as a Puritan church, and its use as a gathering place for political meetings reflects a time when churches were the only buildings large enough to hold a crowd. Benjamin Franklin was baptised here. Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet, worshipped here. The building survived the British occupation during the siege of Boston — the soldiers used it as a riding school, stripping the pews and spreading dirt on the floor — and was nearly demolished for commercial development in 1876 before a public campaign saved it.

Today the meeting house functions as a museum with exhibits on the Tea Party and the broader story of protest and free speech in American history. The simplicity of the interior — white walls, wooden pews, clear glass windows — is itself a statement about the Puritan values that shaped Boston's character: plain, direct, and entirely uninterested in decoration for its own sake.