Griffin's Wharf

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Griffin's Wharf was a working waterfront wharf located along the shoreline of Boston Harbor in Boston, Massachusetts, best known as the site of the Boston Tea Party on the night of December 16, 1773. On that evening, a group of colonists boarded British merchant ships moored at the wharf and cast more than 340 chests of East India Company tea into the harbor, an act of political defiance that became a defining moment in the lead-up to the American Revolution. The original wharf no longer exists; two centuries of landfill operations have buried its precise location beneath what is now the modern Boston waterfront. Despite this loss, Griffin's Wharf endures as among the most symbolically significant sites in American colonial history, and its memory is preserved through commemorations, scholarship, and the nearby Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

Historical Background

In the eighteenth century, Boston's waterfront was a dense network of wharves, warehouses, and docking facilities that formed the commercial backbone of the colonial city. Griffin's Wharf was among these working piers, functioning as a center for maritime commerce and shipping during a period when Boston Harbor was among the busiest ports in the British colonial world.[1] Goods from across the Atlantic arrived and departed through such wharves, making them not only economic hubs but also political flashpoints during the escalating tensions between the American colonies and the British Crown.

By the early 1770s, those tensions had grown acute. The British Parliament had imposed a series of taxes on the colonies, and colonial resistance had become increasingly organized and vocal. The question of taxation without parliamentary representation animated public debate across New England, and Boston in particular became a focal point of colonial discontent. It was against this backdrop that Griffin's Wharf would enter history.

The Boston Tea Party

On December 16, 1773, a large gathering of colonists met at the Old South Meeting House to debate the question of British taxation, specifically concerning a shipment of tea sent by the East India Company under terms that colonists viewed as an instrument of unjust imperial policy.[2] The meeting grew charged, and when it became clear that no acceptable resolution would be reached through official channels, a group of colonists took direct action.

From the gallery of the meeting house came rallying cries, and participants rushed into the streets of Boston, heading for Griffin's Wharf.[3] There, British merchant ships sat at anchor, their holds carrying the disputed tea. The participants, some of whom disguised themselves, boarded the vessels and methodically destroyed the cargo. More than 340 chests of East India Company tea were dumped into Boston Harbor over the course of that night.[4]

The event would come to be known as the Boston Tea Party, a name that compressed a complex act of political protest into a phrase that resonated across generations. The raid on Griffin's Wharf was not a spontaneous riot but a carefully coordinated act, and it provoked a swift and severe response from the British government, including the passage of the Coercive Acts — measures so punitive that they helped consolidate colonial opposition and accelerate the path toward armed conflict.

Location and the Problem of Historical Geography

Pinpointing the exact location of Griffin's Wharf has challenged historians and geographers for generations. The difficulty stems from a fundamental transformation of Boston's physical geography: beginning in the nineteenth century, the city undertook extensive landfill projects that dramatically extended its shoreline into what had once been open water.[5] In the process, the original shoreline — and the wharves that once jutted from it — was buried beneath new land, erasing the physical evidence of Griffin's Wharf from the landscape entirely.

The New York Times has noted that the exact 1773 site of Griffin's Wharf has been lost under two centuries of Boston Harbor landfill.[6] The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum likewise acknowledges that the exact location of the original Griffin's Wharf remains open to scholarly interpretation.[7] Despite these uncertainties, researchers have worked to narrow the probable site using historical maps, documentary records, and geographic analysis. A comprehensive scholarly study has placed the wharf near what is today the Intercontinental Hotel in the Fort Point Channel area of downtown Boston.[8]

This conclusion, while not universally settled, represents the current best scholarly consensus. The area near the Intercontinental Hotel sits within a neighborhood that has been substantially reshaped by the same landfill operations that obscured the wharf's original position. Visitors to modern Boston who seek to stand where Griffin's Wharf once stood are therefore confronted not with open water and wooden planking but with streets, buildings, and the accumulated layers of two and a half centuries of urban development.

Legacy and Commemoration

The disappearance of Griffin's Wharf as a physical place has not diminished its cultural significance. Each year, Boston marks the anniversary of the Tea Party with events that invoke the memory of the December 1773 protest, and Griffin's Wharf is regularly cited as a foundational landmark in the city's revolutionary heritage. The 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, observed in December 2023, drew renewed attention to the events of that night and to the enduring importance of Griffin's Wharf in American political memory.[9]

The wharf's name and its associations have also been invoked throughout American history as a shorthand for popular protest against perceived government overreach. A notable example occurred in 1946, when veterans organized a demonstration they called a "Boston Tea Party" to protest federal price controls, planning to use India Wharf — since Griffin's Wharf no longer existed — as the site for dumping bales of waste paper representing inflationary currency policies.[10] The choice to substitute India Wharf for Griffin's Wharf underscores how thoroughly the original site had vanished from the accessible landscape, even as its symbolic power remained potent enough to inspire imitators more than 170 years later.

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum

The closest present-day approximation of the Griffin's Wharf experience is the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, located along the Congress Street Bridge over the Fort Point Channel. The museum operates replica ships moored at a working wharf and offers visitors an immersive account of the events of December 1773. The museum building itself is described as a small structure adjacent to the replica vessels, and the overall site serves as the primary public memorial to the Tea Party and to the wharf where it took place.[11]

While the museum is not situated on the actual footprint of Griffin's Wharf, it occupies a location that evokes the historical waterfront setting and provides an educational context for understanding what Griffin's Wharf once was and what transpired there. The museum acknowledges the scholarly uncertainty around the exact site of the original wharf, presenting visitors with the current state of historical knowledge rather than asserting a fixed and settled geography.[12]

Significance in Boston's Urban History

Griffin's Wharf occupies a particular place in Boston's urban history not only as a revolutionary landmark but also as an illustration of how dramatically the city's physical form has changed over time. The landfill projects of the nineteenth century that erased the wharf were part of a broader transformation of Boston's geography that also created the Back Bay neighborhood, filled in the Mill Pond, and reshaped the South Boston waterfront. These projects were driven by the demands of a rapidly growing city that needed more land for housing, commerce, and industry.

The loss of Griffin's Wharf to landfill is thus not an isolated event but part of a systemic remaking of the Boston shoreline. That such a historically significant site could be so thoroughly erased reflects both the scale of nineteenth-century engineering ambition and the degree to which urban growth often proceeds without full reckoning for what it displaces. Today, the approximate site of Griffin's Wharf sits in one of Boston's most densely developed areas, surrounded by hotels, offices, and the infrastructure of a twenty-first-century waterfront city.

See Also

References

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