Curiously, around this time, a New York Times article dated 26 October, 1863 reported on the discovery of tea plants growing natively in Western Maryland and Pennsylvania. According to a Boston Bulletin report reprinted in the Times:
The American Tea Company, an association chartered by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, have [sic] employed Dr. Spencer Bonsall, a man of experience and character, to examine the American tea plant... He declares that the tea plant exists in Pennsylvania and Western Maryland beyond all doubt. "It grows indigenously," he states, "in the greatest luxuriance and abundance in the places that I have visited, limited, however, to those localities which afford the peculiar soil indispensable to it, as is the case in China, Assam, and Japan. "...The leaf is almost identical with some of the varieties from which the best tea is made in Assam; and Dr. Bonsall expresses his belief that tea equal to any that is brought from China could be made from this plant.