New England Watch and Ward Society is established.

(May) Originally the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, it is founded by Revs. Phillips Brooks, Edward Everett Hale, Endicott Peabody, and others at a meeting at the Park Street Church. Incorporated in 1891, its purpose is to “Watch and ward off evildoers [and] remove commercialized temptations to vice and crime” in Boston.” Its offices are subsequently at 67 Milk Street, then Joy Street, and then Mount Vernon Street. Methodist minister J. Franklin Chase becomes its long-time executive secretary in 1907. Praised by Robert Wood Johnson as “a sort of Moral Board of Health,” it begins banning books in Boston in 1913.*