Beer: Prohibition in the Nineteenth Century

A doctor named William Clark organized the Union Temperance Society of Moreau and Northumberland. On 30 April 1808, in the upstate New York town of Saratoga, the first organized temperance meeting in the United States was held. Eighteen years after that first temperance meeting in Saratoga, in 1826, citizens in Boston formed the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance. Over the next three years it would gain more than 100,000 members. It was considered the country’s first significant temperance group. In 1836, Saratoga once again hosted the national temperance union meeting. During this session the concept of total abstinence was first proposed. Prior to that, abstention did not include beer. Ten years later, in their first victory of note, the forces of temperance succeeded in bringing prohibition to the state of Maine.