When the fourth graders in the MIA’s Saturday morning Gallery Club were told they’d be discussing Paul Revere, perhaps the wide-eyed young man on the left with arms folded didn’t expect it would include talk of tea parties. The students had most likely read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s dramatic re-telling “of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” in which the Boston patriot warned American colonists that the British were coming. They probably didn’t know about his day job. At this late-1940s gathering of the club, Marjorie Benecke from the education staff presented a tea set made by Revere, a renowned engraver and silversmith. When she showed how to open the tea caddy with a small silver key, she also unlocked the connection between Mr. Revere’s ride and tea drinking in the American colonies.
Revere made superb silver wares for the rich colonists in Boston. This rare tea set, the most complete Revere service known, was made for a Boston merchant and his wife, John and Mehitable Templeman. Revere’s ledger, preserved by his descendants, lists in his hand the pieces made for the set. They include an oval-shaped teapot with fluted sides, a stand for the teapot, a helmet-shaped cream jug, a large urn-shaped sugar bowl, and a caddy with lock and key to safeguard the loose tea inside.
An MIA staffer showing children the Revere Templeman tea service in an undated photo.
Tea imported from China by the British East India Company was an expensive if popular commodity in the American colonies. How it sparked the American Revolution is a familiar story: The British put a tax on the tea, American colonists considered it unfair because they lacked representation in the British Parliament. Revere was a member of the Sons of Liberty, who led a protest against this perceived injustice: the so-called Boston Tea Party. On a December night in 1773, hundreds of men boarded three ships carrying more than 300 chests of tea, smashed them open with axes, and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor—the first organized act of rebellion against British rule.
Revere continued to make tea sets after the revolution, a fitting reminder of his revolutionary past. This one dates to 1792-93, and although the set had been broken up through inheritance by Templeman’s descendants, the pieces were eventually reassembled, loaned, and then gifted to the MIA in 1960 by James Ford Bell—founder of General Mills—and his wife, Louise. Much later, two of the original teaspoons were reunited with the service. Today, the tea service is beloved by tour guides who continue to unlock this tale of early American history for schoolchildren visiting the MIA.