How Yaupon Disappeared From American Cups — And How It Came Back

For a brief period in the 18th century, yaupon was a recognizable commodity in the Atlantic tea trade. By the early 20th century, it had nearly vanished from the commercial market. This post covers how that happened — pieced together from colonial trade records, botanical literature, and 20th-century ethnographic work — and looks at the modern, Indigenous-led revival that is bringing yaupon back. (Post 1 of this series introduces the plant; Post 2 covers ceremonial use.)

A Brief Commercial Moment as "Cassina"

European colonists in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida adopted yaupon from the Indigenous tribes who had been drinking it for centuries. Mark Catesby, in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–1743), described both Indigenous use of the plant and growing colonial consumption.

By the mid-1700s, dried and roasted yaupon was being shipped from southern colonial ports to England and France under the name Cassina (sometimes spelled Cassine or Caceena) and "Carolina tea." It appeared in apothecary catalogs and travel writing. For a short period, it competed on price with imported Asian tea.

That commercial moment did not last. By 1800, Cassina was no longer a meaningful presence in transatlantic trade. Several factors converged.

What Pushed Yaupon Out

The first factor was economic competition. The British East India Company's tea monopoly, and the political and commercial structures supporting imported Asian tea, made a regional alternative inconvenient. Tea taxation, advertising, and supply chains all favored the imported product.

The second factor was a damaging botanical name. In 1789, the British botanist William Aiton published Hortus Kewensis, in which yaupon received the binomial Ilex vomitoria. The name was based on European observers' association of the plant with the Indigenous purification ceremonies described in Post 2 — ceremonies that, in some communities, included intentional ritual vomiting as a separate purifying act. The vomiting was a ritual practice, not a pharmacological effect of the leaf.

Modern analysis confirms yaupon is no more emetic than coffee or tea. But the Latin name stuck, and for the next two centuries it appeared in every botany text and garden manual that referenced the plant. A name like vomitoria is not a foundation on which a beverage industry is rebuilt easily.

The third factor was the disruption of disruption of indigenous cultural practices. The same period in which yaupon's commercial moment ended was a period of severe pressure on Southeastern Indigenous tribes — forced removals, treaty violations, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Trail of Tears (1883s) among them. The plant continued to grow, and Indigenous knowledge of it survived inside families and tribes. The public, commercial conversation about yaupon, however, went largely silent.

The Late Holdouts

Yaupon use did not stop. In coastal North Carolina, particularly along the Outer Banks, yaupon remained a commonly used beverage well into the 19th and early 20th centuries. The last known commercial yaupon operation of that era was a small factory on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, run by a Black entrepreneur known as "Old Man" Scarborough. The naturalist Clement Brimley documented Scarborough's operation in 1905. The factory closed not long after.

Yaupon also saw renewed regional use during periods of imported-tea scarcity, including among Confederate civilians and soldiers during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), when blockades cut off Asian tea. After the war, with imported tea cheap and available again, the regional demand for yaupon faded.

The plant continued to grow wild across millions of acres of the Southeast, often dismissed by 20th-century homeowners as a weed.

Why Yaupon Is Returning

The contemporary revival of yaupon is driven by a small but growing group of producers, foragers, herbalists, historians, and Indigenous-owned businesses. Several factors are working in its favor.

Consumer demand is shifting toward lower-jitter caffeine sources. The combination of caffeine and theobromine in yaupon delivers a more sustained, less anxious lift than most coffee, which lines up with a broader trend toward calmer functional beverages.

Sourcing transparency has become a meaningful purchase factor. Yaupon is grown domestically, often wild-harvested, and frequently produced by small operations with documented practices — three things that increasingly matter to tea buyers.

The historical record has become more accessible. Charles Hudson's edited volume Black Drink: A Native American Tea (1979) brought academic attention back to the plant. More recent work — including the residue analysis published by Crown et al. in PNAS (2015) confirming yaupon at Cahokia — has further established the plant's pre-Columbian range. Popular coverage has followed.

The misnomer is being corrected. Producers, including Catawba Yaupon, consistently note that yaupon is not emetic, that the Ilex vomitoria name is a misnomer rooted in ceremonial misinterpretation, and that the leaf's actual character is mild, low-tannin, and easy to drink.

Where Catawba Yaupon Fits

Catawba Yaupon is an Indigenous-owned company and one participant in the modern revival. We are not the originators of yaupon; the plant has been used across the Southeast by many tribes for at least a thousand years, and it was kept alive in more recent centuries by Black coastal communities and other regional cultivators when the commercial tea market would not. Our role is to harvest, prepare and ship a quality product, to share accurate history, and to operate as one Indigenous-owned business inside a much broader, multi-tribal, multi-community story.

As a wild plant, yaupon's caffeine content varies. A typical cup contains roughly one-third the caffeine of a cup of coffee.

Reading the Series

This is the third post in a three-part Heritage Series. Post 1 introduces the plant. Post 2 covers its ceremonial use across the Southeast. The next series moves into how yaupon is brewed, how it tastes, and how it compares to coffee, green tea, and yerba mate.