Drinking tea was simply a custom from the elite class in Great Britain that survived the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution and the tradition was kept alive by the wealthy leisure class in the south. Jane Pettigrew wrote in the book A Social History of Tea: "When the English captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York in 1674, tea was already well established as an everyday beverage for the wealthier members of the new society...The Boston Tea Party did not destroy the American taste for tea, although few retailers in Boston dared to offer it for sale for a number of years. George and Martha Washington continued to serve the best quality tea and in 1796, the artist Benjamin Henry Latrobe sketched the President taking tea on the porch at Mount Vernon. Others followed suit, drinking tea in the same way as the British, as an after-dinner drink."

Even though many books and articles claim iced tea was invented in the St. Louis World Fair, it actually appeared way earlier and it was actually popular throughout the country, not just in the south. In addition there were evidence suggesting iced tea was made in Russia even prior to that. Johann Georg Kohl travelled to Russia in the 1840's noticed how the Russians stored the winter ice and how it was used to cool drinks: “The Russians cool all their drinks with ice – iced beverages of various descriptions are commonly sold in the streets throughout the summer – and, not satisfied with their iced water, iced wine, and iced beer, they even drink iced tea, substituting for a lump of sugar a similar portion of ice". In Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Food Encyclopedia, the author wrote "Iced tea appeared in the United States, the creation of some anonymous individual, prior to the Civil War". In 1860 a writer for Horace Greely's Tribune, Solon Robinson, published a small volume How to Live: "Last summer we got in the habit of taking the tea iced, and really thought it better than when hot. By 1871 the new beverage competed with iced milk, and iced water on hot summer days at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. In New York...By 1878, travelers found iced tea for sale on the Rock Island Railroad and a popular beverage in Sidney, Nebraska. Cookbooks began to offer recipes for iced tea and in 1886 Senators in their Washington offices were said to have had large coolers of it to mitigate the force of the weather." So what it appears have happened is the rest of the country stopped drinking iced tea became associated with the south at some point rather than iced tea being ubiquitous product of the south. Newspapers like New York Times and Los Angeles Times continued to publish articles implying the popularity of iced tea well into the 1940's.