On the night of December 22, 1774 — almost exactly one year after the Boston Tea Party — a group of men in Cumberland County, New Jersey, dressed as Native Americans, broke into a cellar, seized a shipment of British tea, and burned it in an open field. Richard Howell was among them.

This act of defiance is known as the Greenwich Tea Burning.

Greenwich and the Cohansey River#

Greenwich (pronounced Green-wich) was one of the largest towns in Cumberland County at the time, situated along the Cohansey River. It was at these docks that the English merchant brig Greyhound (Captain J. Allen, master) arrived on December 12–14, 1774, carrying a cargo of tea bound originally for Philadelphia.

Letters written before Richard Howell goes to war.

This timeline covers the Howell family’s origins and Richard Howell’s early life — from the Welsh emigration through the colonial period and the years leading up to the American Revolution.