Artifact: Orange Pekoe Tea Leaves
Materials: Orange Pekoe Tea Leaves
Dimensions:
Date:
Origin:
Collection: WJ Houtman via WikiMedia Commons
License: GFDL
Ledger Entry: Tea
Department: Grocery
Customer: William Baker
Ledger Page: 33
Imported From: While tea was only legally allowed to be imported from Britain, smuggling from other sources was common.
Product Description
Tea was the most popular warm beverage in eighteenth-century British colonial America. Colonial Virginians drank both green and black tea. Tea was certainly a high class beverage, drunk in ritual fashion with the most elegant of equipage, but research indicates that during the eighteenth century up to two-thirds of the residents of British colonial America drank tea regularly.
Citation: Barbara G. Carson, "Determining the Growth and Distribution of Tea Drinking in Eighteenth-Century America," in Steeped in History: The Art of Tea, ed. by Beatrice Hohenegger (Los Angeles: University of California Press/Fowler Museum, 2009), 158-171; Pippa Shirley, "Tea, Coffee and Chocolate," in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, ed. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2002), 108-111
Historical Price: 7 shillings per lb.; Modern USD: $78.5
Product Variations
The databases record thirty-one purchases of tea. Most of these were for either half of a pound or one pound of tea. These ranged in price from two shillings four pence to three shillings five pence for a half of a pound of tea. Nineteen of these purchases are specified as bohea tea.
