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TEA & SWEETS SERVED AT THE CONCORD MUSEUM w/no cuts

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CONCORD, MASS. — In a time-honored tradition, the public is invited to “take tea” at the Concord Museum on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday through March 31 from 1 to 3 pm. Brooke Hall is the venue for a relaxing afternoon of tea and sweets. Tea is served on a walk-in, space-available basis at $7 per person.

Tea drinking is documented in Concord in probate inventories as early as 1729. A Nineteenth Century note on a Concord teapot in the Concord Museum’s collection records that “they went down cellar to make their tea not to have it known they had it” before and during the Revolution when tea was boycotted. Artist Ruth Bascom’s journal of the time she spent in Concord in the 1830s is filled with references to “taking tea” — a ritual recorded by Bascom nearly every afternoon. Ellen Emerson, daughter of Lidian and Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1877, tells of a visit to a local Concord home, “Tuesday I went to tea at Mrs Edward Damon’s, beautiful family, good time…”

The museum’s galleries offer a glimpse of some of the many Concord artifacts related to tea drinking, including a 1774 covenant agreeing to boycott tea, as well as silver tea equipage by Boston silversmith Paul Revere and by the noted Concord silversmith Samuel Bartlett. After January 29, the special exhibition, “Connecticut Valley Furniture by Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1759–1800,” developed by the Connecticut Historical Society Museum, explores the legacy of Chapin and other highly skilled furniture makers.

The Concord Museum is at the intersection of Lexington Road and Cambridge Turnpike. For information, www.ConcordMuseum.org or 978-369-9609.