A young man of eighteen years old, Joseph Eayres, was working as a housewright in Boston, Massachusetts, when news of the East India Company tea arrived.
Eayres volunteered to guard the ship Dartmouth, the first to arrive carrying tea to Boston Harbor in November 1773. Eayres was tasked with preventing the unloading of the tea by customs and the tea merchants, before the people of Boston could determine its fate. Eayres eventually joined his fellow participants in the “destruction of the tea” on December 16, 1773. Sarah Gammell, daughter of participant John Gammell, names Joseph Eayres as a participant alongside her father.
Following the Boston Tea Party, Joseph Eayres joined the fight for independence wherever he could. He was part of the Bostonian “Committee…for the Resolutions of the late Continental Congress into Execution” in 1774, which carried out the orders of the First Continental Congress. During the Revolutionary War, Eayres served as a Major in Colonel Flower’s Continental Army regiment of Artillery Artificers in Springfield, Massachusetts, from January 1777 through December 1779.
Joseph Eayres died in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 12, 1790.
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