Old South Meeting House

Site of the ringleaders of the Boston Tea Party, the Old South Meeting House is today a museum and symbolic beacon for freedom of speech. On Dec. 16, 1773, around 5,000 Massachusetts colonists gathered here to protest a British tax on tea. Negotiations went nowhere, so a group of men took action - hiding their identities under disguise, storming the harbor and tossing tea valued at over $1.5 million into the sea. The subsequent clampdown by British soldiers was a pivotal catalyst for the Revolutionary War.