admin

The Rare Book Cataloging Team came across eight “subscription sheets,” signed petitions dated “Boston, October 28, 1767.” The documents record one of the early calls for Colonial Americans to boycott British goods. The British had just imposed the Townsend Acts, requiring heavy tariffs on British goods. Six years later, the same tensions sparked the famed Boston Tea Party. Civil actions like these foreshadowed the American Revolution.

In 1767, the signers pledged not to buy goods imported from Britain and its other colonies after Dec. 31. The list of boycotted articles opens a window on 18th-century American imports, including furniture, loaf sugar, nails, anchors, hats, shoe leather, linseed oil, glue, malt liquors, starch, gauze, and the dress gloves worn at funerals.

Digging and more digging had turned the cramped backyard of a centuries-old North End home into a hole-pocked jumble of back-filled earth that most tourists passed without a glance on their way to Old North Church.

But this blemish behind the 18th-century Clough House proved to be a blessing for archeologists, who say their dirty work this spring unearthed a rarely found time capsule from the neighborhood’s early days.