About a century ago, the private boarding school movement began in earnest in the United States. What are today considered among the best, if not the best, boarding schools were founded between 1883 and 1906: Lawrenceville (1883); Groton (1884); Woodbury Forest (1889); Taft (1890); Hotchkiss (1892); Choate (1896); St. George's (1896); Middlesex (1901); Deerfield (1903); and Kent (1906). Other schools launched earlier, were enlarged or their character altered during this quarter century: Phillips Andover (1778); Phillips Exeter (1783); Episcopal (1839); Hill (1851); St. Paul's (1856); and St. Mark's (1865). This is the “select sixteen” identified by E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment. Baltzell should know—being a Philadelphia mainliner, a graduate of St. Paul's, and for years professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.