Chestertown Tea Party Festival

The Chestertown Tea Party Festival commemorates the May 1774 Chester Town Resolves and a local legend of Chestertown citizens dumping British tea into the Chester River, reenacted each Memorial Day weekend with a colonial parade, a Tea Toss Reenactment, a military encampment, and a raft race. Free to attend, it draws roughly twenty nonprofit food vendors raising more than seventy-five thousand dollars annually.

In May 1774, Chestertown residents responded to Britain's closing of the Port of Boston by adopting what became known as the Chester Town Resolves, a formal local resolution banning the import, sale, and consumption of tea, and local legend holds that citizens then marched to the brigantine Geddes docked on the Chester River and threw its tea cargo overboard, a Maryland echo of the same colonial tea protests that made Boston famous.