Samuel Cobb is elected mayor of Boston.

Cobb (Non-partisan), with 19,187 votes, defeats Henry Cushing, with 572, and others to be elected to the first of three consecutive terms as mayor. Inaugurated on January 5, 1874, Cobb opposes creating jobs for the unemployed during the Depression of 1873, declaring the idea “subversive to our whole social fabric, tending directly to communism in its worst form.”