Isaac Pitman

(July 28, 1752 – November 15, 1818) 

In his application to join the New England Historic and Genealogical Society in the 1870s, Isaac Pitman’s great-grandson says that Isaac Pitman was part of the uprising that became known as the Boston Tea Party.

In 1896, another woman named Alice Morse Earle claimed in an article written to the American Monthly Magazine that Isaac himself told her of his participation in the event. In that article, Earle states that Pitman claimed he saw a man named Charles Conner’s [written as O’Connor’s in the magazine article] “coat tails torn off, and O’Connor badly beaten and bruised, and soon detected another of the party in the act surreptitiously filling the tea in the great flap pockets of his coat.” Earle’s article goes on to say, “the young patriot crept up unseen and unheard behind the sneak and cautiously emptied the contents of the pockets back into the sea.” 

During the Revolutionary War, Pitman served as a Captain in Colonel Elliot’s Artillery regiment in Roxbury, Massachusetts from September – December 1775. By 1790, after the war’s end, Pitman was a successful merchant in Providence, Rhode Island. 

He died on November 18, 1818 and was buried in King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston.