On 16 December 1773, more than 5,000 Bostonians crammed into this church to hear Samuel Adams declare that "this meeting can do nothing more to save the country." It was the pre-arranged signal: men dressed as Mohawks slipped out the door, marched to Griffin's Wharf, and dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party — and the spiral toward open war — began here.
The largest building in colonial Boston when it was built in 1729, the meeting house was used by the patriots as a venue for the kind of mass meeting that the smaller Faneuil Hall could not hold. The British, after the siege began, gutted it and used the interior as a stable for their officers' horses — a desecration Bostonians did not forget.
The interior today is a quiet hall with high galleries and white walls, used for talks, concerts, and a self-guided exhibit on the Tea Party. Audio re-enactments play the speeches that filled the room that December night.