State

Another Echo Of The Tea Party Our urit«»r resurrects л 1оиц-1'огц«1- ten news story, and a fascinating Mediterranean relic pops up again in Edenton. tty CIRTIS CARROLL DAVIS For the рам several years I have been mainly occupied with the pursuit of women. . . . Women from our Revolutionary pe¬ riod who asserted themselves against the British invader in untraditional. non-heart hside ways. Women who spied, who informed, who served as couriers, who fought in the lines — any such "females" who went out of their way to label themselves as functioning resisters. I am looking for the earliest reliable accounts by or about such women in order to put their stories into a book (which has never been done before). In the more northerly of the two Carolina colonies, as of October. 1774. fifty-one such women so labelled themselves. They were, of course, those dames of the Edcnton area who foregathered there and signed a resolution against the consumption of tea. w ith the result that this "tea party" of theirs became one of the better known episodes in the opening Revolutionary annals of the Old North State. Mainly this was be¬ cause news of the affair promptly reached the capital of empire. London, and there, in March. 1775. became the subject of a satirical mezzotint that caught everyone’s eye. Down the de¬ cades reproductions of this drawing — probably by the well known artist Philip Da we — have appeared far and wide, one of the more recent being in the March. 1977. issue of this maga¬ zine. Th« U S Ship NORTH CAROLINA (102 gunt) «ot making о routine сине coll on the Boleor.c Island of Mmorco in 1826 -hen Lt. Wilhom Muse, of Edenton forebcort, ditcovcrcd о "picture pointed on glott" reproduction of the meiiotint publithcd in London in 1775 totiriung the Edcnton Teo Forty Lt. Mute bought the relic ond brought it bock to North Caroline Lt Mute it generolly toid to hove found the relic in a borber thop in Fort Mohon in 1830, but the contemporary account in the "Norfolk Herold," given here, plocet the ditcovery in a thoemoker'i thop of Ciudodolo, on the oppotito end of the itlond, in 1826. (N.C. Div. of Archive! & Hittory photo) 16 Thit giont teopot, foth.oned of broni* ond mounted on the upturned borrel of о Revolutionary connon, morkt the location, on the eott tide of Edenton't green, -here the Edcnton lodict met of Mrt Eliiobeth Kmg'i retidence, Oct 25, 1774, to pro- tcit the to« on teo, in «hot moy hove been the first initancc of politicol octiviim by «omen in the U.S. The Minorcan Discovery Bui probably the most exotic, cer¬ tainly the most coincidental, manifes¬ tation of the mezzotint - - a painting on glass, about 14" by 10" — popped upon the little Balearic island of Minorca, in the western Mediterranean. There it was stumbled upon by a naval officer of Tarheel forebears whose ship, the North Carolina, was making a routine cruise call at the place. This discovery occurred long after the close of the American Revolution, when most people in the new nation had forgotten all about the Edcnton Tea Party. In 1830 that carefree juggler of North Carolina facts and figures. William Hill Wheeler, encountered the reproduc¬ tion at Edenton and eventually touched on the subject in his Historical Sketches ... (1851). with the pro¬ nouncement that it had been "found at Gibraltar.” Decades later a more careful chronicler, the Edenton physi¬ cian and antiquarian Richard Dillard, heard a more circumstantial account from a local lady who owned the relic at the time. She advised Dillard that the naval officer who had first come upon the picture was Lieutenant William T. Muse — his mother was a Blount, of Edenton — and that he had found it not at Gibraltar but at Port Mahon, chief tow n of Minorca, w here it w as hanging in a barber shop. Dillard published his findings in the first volume of North Carolina Booklet (August. 1901). an organ of the state Society of the Daughters of the Revolution. His in¬ formation that the item w as discovered in a barber shop at Port Mahon has endured and proliferated. See. for ex¬ ample. a 1955 issue of this magazine, where we are additionally instructed that the date of discovery was 1830. THE STATE, Манси 1962