Penelope Barker Week continues …

In addition to knowing who Penelope Barker is because of her role in women's political history, I think it's also important to know that one of her relatives is the well-known tea expert James Norwood Pratt. In his New Tea Lover's Treasury, he writes, "In my own family, successive generations of womenfolk have disputed custody of a so-called Penelope Barker tea service, not always civilly. This handsome old silver pot and its companion pieces were once the possessions of our most notorious ancestor on the Barker side, a thrice-married and thrice-widowed forerunner of Scarlett O'Hara invariably known to us, her posterity, as 'Mrs. Barker.'"

Pratt notes that history has largely forgotten that Boston was not the only city with a tea protest. He writes, "The tale of Penelope Barker's tea party at Edenton has survived, however, handed down in our family along with the very pot that was present for the occasion. Generations of children have been suitably impressed by this big old pot and Mrs. Barker's phrase, 'the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea.'"

After drinking a "farewell cup," Pratt says, Mrs. Barker and fifty other Edenton ladies vowed they would no longer drink tea until the Tea Act, among others, was repealed. (Side note: Imagine having to enjoy your last cup of tea! Sort of like a death-row last meal, I suppose.) Pratt says the ladies signed a document noting their intentions, it was printed in a London newspaper, and soon after it appeared in print, "some anonymous New Englander fired 'the shot heard round the world' and with a prenatal disinclination for tea our Republic began struggling to be born."

Pratt says his family likes to think this was all "largely Mrs. Barker's doing," and he believes that "hot tea from her pot tasted better, I still think, because it was 'Pernicious.'"

Isn't that a terrific story?

Coming Friday: Who are the other women who signed the document at the Edenton Tea Party?