This small glass bottle contains tea leaves gathered across the harbor from Boston, on the shore of Dorchester Neck, on December 17, 1773 the morning after the Boston Tea Party, by a citizen who wanted a souvenir of the event. The evening prior, colonists dressed in disguises–including some disguised as Indigenous people– had ransacked three British ships waiting to unload their cargo of tea. Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842) was five years old at the time of the Boston Tea Party and presented these tea leaves in their glass bottle to the Massachusetts Historical Society before his death in 1842. It is not known whether Thaddeus, a member of his family, or someone else collected the tea and labeled the bottle. The tea on board the ships was loose inside the chests and, when emptied into Boston Harbor at low tide on the night of December 16, 1773, mixed with the mud and salt water.