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Inspired by a stray thought about the role tea played in the ARW, I was looking up some history of tea cultivation in North America:
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.

So, what if European explorers and/or colonists discover tea plants growing natively in North America in the 17th C., either adopted to growing conditions there or growing in the few areas suitable? What happens to the tea trade and how does it affect things in general?

Edit: AHC points if you have it cultivated by the Amerinds and extra points for TTL having an event known as the Boston Tea Party.
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