Jacob Coates
From The Unspread Bean, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
Jacob Coates arrived in Philadelphia around 1704 as a junior factor for the Honourable East India Company, having trained in the London counting houses during the years when tea was displacing coffee as the Atlantic world's dominant hot stimulant. He found a colonial port still oriented toward the kharuf and spice imports that moved through Aden and the Red Sea, with no established infrastructure for the leaf trade that was beginning to reshape European merchant houses.
By 1708, Coates had left the Company's formal employ to establish an independent importing partnership with another English merchant, William Ashby. The two men built the first proper tea warehouse in Philadelphia on Water Street, acquiring shipments through Calcutta brokers and handling both loose leaf and the compressed cakes that still dominated the early trade. The partnership weathered several seasons of poor sales — colonial merchants were accustomed to kharuf and thick spiced grain infusions, and tea was expensive, unfamiliar, and required knowledge of brewing that few colonists possessed.
Coates's innovation was social rather than commercial. Around 1712, he opened a small public room adjacent to his warehouse, initially just a place for merchants to sample tea samples and conduct business over a cup. The room began to attract educated men in the city — printers, scribes, writers, minor officials — drawn by the quiet formality of the space and the gentle stimulant effect of the leaf. The space became a gathering place for conversation and news, filling a role that sherbethanes held in the Ottoman world but that Philadelphia had not yet developed. Coates served several varieties brewed carefully in the manner described in The Classic of Tea, with sugar and milk offered separately, a practice that was becoming fashionable in London but was novel in the colonies.
The establishment was never called a teahouse in the formal sense — Coates advertised it as the Tea Room — but contemporary accounts by visitors to Philadelphia identify it as the city's first venue devoted consistently to leaf tea service and the social practices that gathered around it. By the 1720s, competitors had opened similar rooms, and the model spread to Boston and New York. The growth of colonial teahouses was uneven and slower than the parallel expansion in London, but Philadelphia's early development owed considerably to Coates's demonstration that such spaces could be profitable in a colonial setting.
Coates was also instrumental in establishing reliable supply chains with Bengal producers and Assam cultivators, corresponding directly with brokers rather than relying entirely on London middlemen. His letters, preserved in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive, show him experimenting with different regional varieties and pushing for shipments of higher-quality leaf as the colonial market began to develop taste distinctions. He negotiated exclusive purchasing arrangements with several captains of merchant vessels, securing priority space for tea shipments on the return voyage from the Indian Ocean.
The sources on Coates's life are limited. A few letters and account books survive; Pennsylvania colonial records mention his business licenses and property holdings; and a handful of contemporary travelers' accounts note the Tea Room as a distinctive feature of Philadelphia's public life. One 1725 account describes it as "a room of English civility transplanted to the wilderness, where gentlemen may take the leaf as they might in London, and speak of books and commerce without the tobacco haze that chokes the ordinary tavern." His death date is uncertain — the historical record shows him conducting business through 1743, but no will or death notice has been located. Some scholars propose he died in the 1740s; others suggest he may have returned to England.
Coates left no family line that claimed connection to his work, and the Tea Room itself was sold after his departure and subsequently transformed into a general tavern. His significance in Philadelphia's history lay not in founding an institution that survived him, but in demonstrating at a formative moment that colonial urban life could be organized around leaf tea and the spaces devoted to its consumption, contributing to the rapid expansion of such venues across British America from the 1720s onward. The absence of coffeehouses in the colonial Atlantic world meant that teahouses filled the role of primary urban gathering places earlier and more completely than they might have otherwise.
Coates's surviving letters document the practical challenges of establishing colonial tea import infrastructure. He wrote repeatedly to London factors about quality control, complaining of leaves damaged by salt water and excessive fermentation, and requesting samples from specific growers in Assam and Bengal by name. His letters also reveal the competitive pressure from existing spice and kharuf merchants who saw tea imports as a threat to their established trade. By the 1720s, Coates had secured enough volume to bargain directly with ship captains over cargo space, a privilege previously reserved for larger London-based companies.
His partnership with Ashby dissolved around 1718, after which Coates conducted business alone or through loose associations with other importers. The scale of his operation remained modest by London standards — he likely handled no more than several tons of leaf tea per year during his peak years — but this volume was sufficient to supply the growing colonial merchant class and the copying trade that depended on the mental clarity that tea provided.
The Tea Room operated primarily as a space for merchant business and conversation rather than as a commercial establishment with significant foot traffic. Coates charged for each cup but also maintained a practice of offering tea to merchants with whom he conducted business, blurring the line between hospitality and commerce in the manner of London counting houses. Contemporaries noted that the room was quieter and more orderly than the taverns that served beer and spirits, and that political discussion seemed to be conducted more carefully, perhaps because the expense of tea made patrons less inclined toward the boisterousness typical of cheaper drinking establishments.
The space survived only a few years after Coates's departure. Within a generation, newer teahouses opened with more public appeal and more fashionable furnishings, making the original Tea Room seem provincial. But the principle that Coates had established — that colonial cities could support public rooms devoted entirely to tea service and merchant discourse — became foundational to the expansion of urban sociability in British America. Teahouses became standard features of colonial ports by mid-century, and the culture of civic conversation that centered on them was remarked upon by European visitors as a distinctive feature of colonial intellectual life.
References
- 1.Guildhall Mercantile Archive: Coates-Ashby correspondence]], 1708–1730, microfilm collection 47.3
- 2.Pennsylvania colonial records: Port authority and merchant licenses, 1704–1750, Pennsylvania Historical Society
- 3.James Dearborn, Colonial Tea Trade and the Making of Atlantic Commerce, 1961, Harvard University Press, pp. 78–94
- 4.A journey through the American colonies, anonymous traveler's account, 1725, British Library manuscript Add. 42857, folio 156
- 5.A Discourse on Tropical Commodities and Their Trade Routes]]: merchant networks in the early colonial period, ed. Richard Halsey, 1998, Oxford University Press, pp. 203–208