dia Company appealed to Parliament for aid, and was
permitted to export tea, a privilege it had never before enjoyed.
Cargoes were sent on consignment to selected commissioners in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The story of the subsequent
happenings properly belongs in a book on tea. It is sufficient here to
refer to the climax of the agitation against the fateful tea tax,
because it is undoubtedly responsible for our becoming a nation of
coffee drinkers instead of one of tea drinkers, like England.

[Illustration: AN EARLY FAMILY COFFEE ROASTER

This machine, known in Holland as a "Coffee Burner," was used late in
the 18th century in New England. It hung in the fireplace or stood in
the embers]

The Boston "tea party" of 1773, when citizens of Boston, disguised as
Indians, boarded the English ships lying in Boston harbor and threw
their tea cargoes into the bay, cast the die for coffee; for there and
then originated a subtle prejudice against "the cup that cheers", which
one hundred and fifty years have failed entirely to overcome. Meanwhile,
the change wrought in our social customs by this act, and those of like
nature following it, in the New York, Pennsylvania, and Charleston
colonies, caused coffee to be crowned "king of the American breakfast
table", and the sovereign drink of the American people.

[Illustration: HISTORICAL RELICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE EARLY DAYS OF
COFFEE IN NEW ENGLAND

These exhibits are in the Museum of the Maine Historical Society at
Portland. On the left is Kenrick's Patent coffee mill. In the center is
a Britannia urn with an iron bar for heating the liquid. The bar was
encased in a tin receptacle that hung inside the cover. On the right is
a wall type of coffee or spice grinder]

_Coffee in Colonial New England_

The history of coffee in colonial New England is so closely interwoven
with the story of the inns and taverns that it is difficult to
distinguish the genuine coffee house, as it was known in England, from
the public house where lodgings and liquors were to be had. The coffee
drink had strong competition from the heady wines, the liquors, and
imported teas, and consequently it did not attain the vogue among the
colonial New Englanders that it did among Londoners of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Although New England had its coffee houses, these were actually taverns
where coffee was only one of the beverages served to patrons. "They