This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The institution now known as the Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association was established in 1916 as the Christian Science Benevolent Association, a department of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known as The Mother Church, realizing Mary Baker Eddy's own vision of a place where those relying on Christian Science for healing could find care outside a conventional medical setting. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, had died in 1910, six years before her vision took this specific institutional form.
For its first six and a half decades the institution operated as a department of The Mother Church itself, its governance folded directly into the church's own administrative structure rather than run as a separate entity with its own board. That arrangement held until 1981, when the Christian Science Board of Directors transferred it to an independent board of trustees, and it was renamed the Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association.
The organization became tax exempt as a separate entity in 1982, one year after the governance transfer, completing a shift from an internal church department to a legally independent nursing care institution that nonetheless continues to provide specifically Christian Science nursing care rather than conventional medical treatment, the same distinction Eddy's original vision was built around in 1916.