Golden Ball Tavern Museum

History:
This is probably the most unusual and without question the most evocative house museum in New England...The Golden Ball is not your standard house museum; therefore, their standard tour is not the standard house museum tour."

For over two hundred years, the Golden Ball Tavern has stood on the "great country road" in Weston, Massachusetts, weathering changes of fortune and time. And yet, it is today as alive and vibrant as ever in its past, for the house has a story to tell. It is a story of a colonial tavern, a gracious home, and the six generations of the family that lived in it. It is a detective story, filled with clues about the changes that were made to this house. But mostly, it is a story of the man who built it.

The Golden Ball Tavern was one of four taverns on Weston's well-traveled Post Road. Not simply a place for food and drink, eighteenth century taverns served as a location for travelers to exchange news, gossip and mail. Taverns also functioned as important community centers, where militiamen met after drills, churchgoers gathered between services, and political meetings were held. Among the most popular drinks served to tavern patrons in Isaac's day were rum, beer and cider. But the beverage that would become most significant at the Golden Ball Tavern was tea

Tea drinking was an important social custom in eighteenth century Britain - a custom which, along with the tea itself, was imported to the American colonies. But by 1773, more than tea was brewing in colonial Massachusetts. Many colonists rebelled against British laws that restricted American merchants from trading in tea, and the drink became a symbol of British tyranny.