From a chance encounter at a historic Connecticut inn to a family-owned company with an international reach, the history of Harney & Sons holds as many surprises, nuances, and rewards as the hundreds of teas our company now sells.Â
From the Roots Up Â

Our company’s story begins in Lakewood, Ohio: a Cleveland suburb where my father, John David Harney, was born on August 26, 1930.Â
By 1940, Dad’s family had moved to his mother’s hometown of Dunkirk, New York. After her untimely passing in 1942, my father went to live with other family members, eventually landing in Manchester, Vermont with his mom’s stepbrother, an innkeeper named Jack Ortleib.Â

Once he graduated from Manchester’s Burr and Burton Academy, Dad went to work at his uncle and aunt’s properties, the Orvis Inn and the Wilburton Inn. It was at the Wilburton Inn where he met the love of his life: my mom, Elizabeth G. “Elyse” Deublein, who had a summer job waiting tables there.
It wasn’t too long after that when my dad joined the Marines, serving our country for four years. After leaving the service in 1952, he entered Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration before he and Mom got married in February 1953.Â
Supper Clubs, Country Inns, and Sarum TeaÂ

By the time my father left Cornell in early 1956, he and Mom already had two children (my older brother and yours truly) and needed money. After a brief but lucrative stint managing Dore’s, a colorful supper club in Pittsburgh, Dad moved our family back to New England, where he and Mom leased and managed the Covered Bridge Inn in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Finally, around 1960, our family moved once more…this time to Salisbury, Connecticut, where my father became a managing partner of the historic White Hart Inn.Â
At that time, Salisbury, Connecticut was also home to Stanley Mason, a native of London, England who had first come to the United States in 1926. After working for a series of tea companies in New York City, Stanley had retired with his wife, Mildred, to Salisbury in the 1950s. There, he began blending and packaging his own loose-leaf teas under the name “Sarum” (a shortening of Salisbury, England’s old Roman name, which paid tribute to both Mason’s native land and his current home).Â

Soon after John Harney became the White Hart’s innkeeper, Stanley Mason met with him and asked him to sell Sarum teas at the inn. Dad agreed, and as guests began asking where they could buy Sarum teas outside the inn, he started to think about buying Sarum Tea…which he (along with some partners) eventually did in 1970, hiring Stanley as a consultant.Â

Sarum Tea’s operations moved into the basement of the White Hart Inn, and Mr. Mason started mentoring my father, teaching him everything he knew about tea (while teenage me packed loose tea into tins…sometimes with the correct weight). As Dad learned more and more, it wasn’t long before he started doing his own blending and selling Sarum teas to bigger hotels (such as the Ritz-Carlton in Boston).Â
Harney & Sons Is Born (Minus the Sons)

Stanley Mason passed away in February 1980…and a few years later, Dad’s partners at the White Hart announced that they were selling the White Hart Inn. That was a pivotal moment for my parents. In 1983, both were in their early 50s and had no retirement savings to speak of. That’s when John Harney, at age 53, decided he was going to start Harney & Sons Tea from the basement of his 1950s ranch house. (For whatever reason, a lot of our early history seems to have happened in basements.)Â
Back then, the “& Sons” part of our company name was purely creative license. I was off in Chicago running the Richmont Hotel, and my brother Paul was still in high school. But the name had a good ring to it, and Dad’s vision did come true eventually.Â
Much like a tea kettle, it took a while for Harney & Sons to build up steam. Fortunately, my mom got her real estate license around that time, and it was mainly her income that supported the family back then. Elyse Harney Real Estate has been a continued success for well over 35 years now, helping clients buy and sell properties throughout the Tri-State Region. My younger sister, Elyse Harney Morris, is now a principal broker and co-owner of that company as well.Â
Anyway, back when Harney & Sons started out, the company only had six kinds of tea: English Breakfast, Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Gunpowder Green, Formosa Oolong, and Irish Breakfast. Dad became sort of a traveling tea ambassador in those years. His time at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, coupled with his innkeeping background, had earned him quite a few contacts among hotel and restaurant managers. He would travel around the country, educating general managers on the finer points of tea and convincing them to carry his product.Â
One of Dad’s more successful sales techniques was to request a sample of the tea the restaurant or hotel was serving. Next, he would rip open the competitor’s tea bag and compare it with Harney & Sons tea, while asking the manager, “How can you serve dust?!?” More often than not, his method worked.
We also started selling to retail stores around this time. Dad said once that he felt like “the Johnny Appleseed of the tea world,” and he really did play an important part in re-popularizing tea around the United States.Â
The Sons Join Harney

In 1988, I left the hotel business and joined the company as the first “& Son.” By 1993, we’d left basements behind and started an honest-to-goodness above-ground factory in Lakeville, Connecticut. A couple of years later, my wife Brigitte opened and managed the first Harney retail store.Â
By this time, our teas were being carried by Williams-Sonoma (Chuck Williams was an early customer and a longtime friend of Dad’s), which helped even more people become aware of us. This was about the time my father registered the toll-free number 1-800-TEA-TIME, which gave customers a quick, easy-to-remember way to contact us (it also gave my sister Elyse a free way to call home, back when she was still in college).
We’d also started doing a lot of traveling, as we journeyed around the world to find the best teas. By 1997, we were selling more than 100 varieties of tea: quite a leap forward for a company that started with only six blends! Back then, English Breakfast was our most popular, followed by Earl Grey, followed by Hot Cinnamon Spice (which has long since vaulted into the top position).Â
It was also in 1997 when my younger brother Paul left the Marines (I should probably say “Oorah” here) to join our ranks…finally making “& Sons” a plural reality.

By 2000, Paul had talked us into moving out of Connecticut, across the state lines to Millerton, New York. After renting space for a couple of years, we bought an 88,000 square-foot building in July 2003 that gave us room to expand. At the end of that year, we had about 40 workers.Â
Two years later, our Harney store moved to its new location in Millerton. My wife Brigitte stayed on as manager of the Millerton Store, and our first-born son Alex now runs the café on the restaurant side, acting as executive chef, manager, and even photographer.
Six years later, we launched our SoHo store in New York City, and my son Emeric runs that establishment, as well as acting as marketing director and handling our website (which now accounts for more than 25% of our business).Â
A New Chapter BeginsÂ

In June of 2014, our founder, John Harney, passed on at age 83. The New York Times hailed him as a missionary who had spread the “gospel of tea”…and Dad had enjoyed a lot of recognition in his later years. He’d been named Man of the Year by the U.S. Tea Association. He’d been hailed as a food artisan by Bon AppĂ©tit magazine. He’d won the inaugural Cha Jing Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2011 World Tea Expo. …and, of course, he’d remained a key part of the company he’d raised from basement to breakthrough.Â
In the years since, the company that John Harney founded has only continued to grow. One of the more recent developments in Harney history is the launch of our brother company, The Hemp Division, in 2018. Since growing hemp had become legal in New York state, we got permits from the government to grow and process hemp, then worked with farmers to plant thousands of hemp seedlings on our property in Millerton.Â
These days, The Hemp Division is offering blends of tea and cannabidiol (CBD), in addition to CBD and THC-infused tinctures, canned and bottled beverages and other items. In our view, this is simply a natural extension of the healthy beverages that Harney & Sons has been blending and selling since 1983.
We’ve come a long way since Dad was blending teas downstairs on Robin Hill Lane. These days, we’re selling upwards of 400 different teas and employing about 350 people worldwide. Not bad for a company with no external investors!Â
I’m grateful to have had this chance to relive the history of Harney & Sons. From the beginning, my dad’s mission was to make tea an everyday luxury. Over the past 40-odd years, we’ve done a lot to make his dream a reality…and we can’t wait to write the next chapter in our family’s success story.Â





