Griffin's Wharf

Griffin's Wharf, where the tea ships Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver were boarded on the night of 16 December 1773, no longer exists. It ran out into the harbour from the foot of Hutchinson Street, now Pearl Street, and its site lies under landfill beneath Atlantic Avenue near Pearl Street. The shore street of the time was Purchase Street, so everything east of it was once water and wharves. Before the Tea Party the ships lay at the wharf under a guard of 25 men from the grenadier company of the Boston Regiment, the young bookseller Henry Knox among them, to make sure no tea was landed. Samuel Adams Drake recorded in 1873 that the disguised party went from the Old South Meeting House through Milk Street directly to Griffin's. Griffin's Wharf had large warehouses, and the detachment of the 59th Regiment and the artillery that landed with the occupying troops in October 1768 were quartered in them. By Drake's time the wharf had been renamed Liverpool Wharf. Atlantic Avenue was later cut across the old wharf heads and the shore filled out around them, and the wharf disappeared from the map. Nobody now knows its exact footprint; even the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, on the Congress Street Bridge about 230 metres to the south-east, calls the precise site open to debate and presents its own position as an approximation. A brass plaque on the Independence Wharf building at 470 Atlantic Avenue marks the event, and another marker stands at Congress and Purchase Streets.