1765

Charlestown has become a principal port of the Bay Colony.  The town manufactures rum, sugar loaves, candles, pottery and leather goods and exports those items plus fur, lumber, pipe staves, and building frames. . . . Charlestown defies Parliament’s newly-passed Stamp Act and conducts its own “Tea Party” by destroying a quantity of tea in a bonfire eight years before the “Boston Tea Party” dumps tea in the harbor in a similar protest in 1773.