Tea Leaves / Being a Collection of Letters and Documents relating to / the shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year / 1773, by the East India Tea Company. (With an introduction, / notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party)

by Francis S. Drake

DAVID KINNISON,

The last of the tea party, born in Old Kingston, near Portsmouth, Maine, November 17, 1736; died in Chicago, February 24, 1852; aged one hundred and fifteen years. Up to the Revolution he was a farmer, at Lebanon, whence, with a few comrades, members of a political club, he went to Boston, with the express purpose of destroying the tea. He was in active service during the war, participating in many battles, and was a prisoner among the Indians at its close. He was a farmer, at Wells, Maine, when the war of 1812 broke out, and was in the battles at Sackett's Harbor and Williamsburg, and in the latter was badly wounded in the hand, by a grape-shot. He afterwards lived at Lyme, and at Sackett's Harbor, N.Y., and in July, 1845, went to Chicago. At Lyme, while felling a tree, he was struck down by a limb, which fractured his skull, broke his collar bone, and two of his ribs. While engaged in discharging a cannon, at a training at Sackett's Harbor, both legs were broken and badly shattered. Up to 1848 he had always made something by his labor, and was the father of twenty-two children. He learned to read when past sixty. A daughter, who survived in 1848, was made acquainted in that year with her father's existence, by the publication of Mr. Lossing's "Field Book of the Revolution." Hastening to him, she smoothed the patriarch's pillow in his passage to the grave.

JOSEPH LEE,

Merchant, on Long Wharf, afterwards at 9 Doane Street, was a member of Massachusetts Lodge of Freemasons, in 1773, and died February 6, 1831; aged eighty-six.

AMOS LINCOLN,

Born in Hingham, Mass., March 17, 1753, died at Quincy, Mass., January 15, 1829. He was apprenticed to a Mr. Crafts, at the North End, who, on the evening of December 16, 1773, secretly procured for him an Indian disguise, dressed him in his own chamber,—darkening his face to the required tint,—and then, dropping on his knees, prayed most fervently that he might be protected in the enterprise in which he was engaged. Joining Stark's New Hampshire regiment, he was in the battle of Bunker Hill; was afterwards a captain in Craft's artillery regiment, and was at one time in charge of the castle, in Boston harbor. When Shays' insurrection broke out, he assisted in its suppression. He was a housewright of much skill. The wood-work of the State House was under his charge, and evinces the grace and beauty of his workmanship. He married a daughter of Paul Revere. His grandson, Frederick W. Lincoln, has been mayor of Boston. He joined St. Andrew's Lodge of Freemasons, in 1777. Governor Levi Lincoln, of Massachusetts, and Governor Enoch Lincoln, of Maine, were nephews of Captain Amos Lincoln.