The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society Is Incorporated in Pennsylvania

Five years after Charles Taze Russell founded the Watch Tower movement in 1879, already recorded here, and twenty five years before the Society moved its headquarters to Brooklyn in 1909, also recorded here, Russell's Bible tract ministry acquired a legal existence independent of any one person. Judge F. H. Collier of the Court of Common Pleas for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, granted a charter to Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society on 13 December 1884, recorded two days later on 15 December 1884, naming Russell as its first president and the dissemination of Bible truths through tracts, pamphlets, papers and other religious literature as its stated purpose. Incorporation let the small Pittsburgh based ministry hold property and publish continuously in its own right, turning what had begun as Russell's personal periodical, Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, into an institution capable of outliving its founder. The corporation dropped Zion's from its name in 1896 to become the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, and the movement itself did not adopt the name Jehovah's Witnesses until 1931. The Society's own centennial history, published in 1984 to mark the charter's hundredth anniversary, credits the 1884 incorporation with giving the movement the legal and institutional footing its later literature campaigns depended on, a reading M. James Penton's academic history of Jehovah's Witnesses treats as the decisive administrative step that let Russell's preaching expand beyond a single congregation and survive his death in 1916.