Oberlin College

At a glance

Overview

Oberlin was laid out in 1833 in unbroken forest in the south part of Russia Township, Lorain County, by two Presbyterian ministers, John Jay Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart, as a covenanted Christian colony built around a manual labor school, the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, which opened on December 3, 1833. Its first circular promised education to both sexes, and in 1837 four women entered the regular college course; three graduated in 1841, the first women in the country to earn arts degrees. In February 1835, to win the Lane Seminary rebels, their Eastern backers and Charles Finney, the trustees voted by one casting vote to admit students without regard to color; the Landmark nomination says it was at Oberlin that the education of Black students was made a matter of institutional policy. Town and college became a center of abolition and an Underground Railroad station, and in September 1858 hundreds of Oberlin and Wellington residents took the fugitive John Price from federal officers at a Wellington hotel, a rescue whose trials in Cleveland became a national cause. Renamed Oberlin College in 1850, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 for its role in admitting African Americans and women.

The name

Shipherd and Stewart named the colony and school for Jean-Frédéric Oberlin (1740-1826), an Alsatian minister whose work in a poor and remote district had impressed them; Stewart had been reading a newly published account of his life to Shipherd. The school was chartered as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, and the name was changed to Oberlin College in 1850. (source)

Native American history

The 1879 History of Lorain County records that when the colonists began clearing in 1833 the only opening they found in the forest was a clover patch about twenty feet square, near where the Second Church later stood, 'which had been for many years an Indian encampment'; on that spot the school's trustees held their first meeting on the ground. No village, mound or named site is recorded on the Oberlin tract itself, and the historians do not say which nation used the camp. The land lay in Connecticut's Western Reserve west of the Cuyahoga River, and Indian title to it was extinguished by the Treaty of Fort Industry on July 4, 1805, signed by the Wyandot, Ottawa, Chippewa, Munsee, Delaware, Shawnee and Potawatomi, who ceded the Reserve lands west of the Cuyahoga for $20,000 in goods and a perpetual annuity of $9,500. The first white settlements in Russia Township came in 1818, in its northwest corner; the south part, where Oberlin stands, was still forest in 1833.

• Indian encampment clearing: camp, A small clover patch opposite the later site of Oberlin's Second Church, Before 1833
• Treaty of Fort Industry: treaty, Ceded Western Reserve lands west of the Cuyahoga, including Russia Township, July 4, 1805

Stories

The elm and the bear

The founding story comes from James Fairchild, who told it in 1883 as an 'undisputed tradition.' The day after a season of prayer in Elyria, Shipherd and Stewart rode about eight miles south through the woods to the level clay land of southern Russia Township, where the owners had offered 500 acres for a school. They tied their horses to one tree and knelt under another to pray. A hunter who came along told them a black bear and two cubs had climbed down the tree their horses were tied to about ten minutes before they arrived. The tree they knelt under was remembered as the great elm in the college park, and the overgrown survey line beside it became Main Street. (source)

'They're coming, father!'

Oberlin was not founded as an abolitionist school. The question of Black students came with the offer of the Lane Seminary rebels, their Tappan money, Asa Mahan and Charles Finney, all on condition that the school admit students regardless of color. The trustees hesitated; when the question was finally put in February the board was evenly divided, and chairman John Keep cast the deciding vote for a guarded resolution that the education of people of color 'should be encouraged and sustained in this institution.' Fairchild wrote that there were no Black students at the door, and only one Black resident in the county, yet the excitement was intense: when a single Black man was later seen entering the settlement, a trustee's small son ran home shouting, 'They're coming, father - they're coming!' By 1883 about a thousand of Oberlin's 20,000 students had been Black. (source)

Four women in the freshman class

Oberlin's first circular in 1834 promised 'the elevation of female character' by opening to women the privileges that had 'hitherto unreasonably distinguished the leading sex.' Women first studied in a female department of their own; from 1838 the catalogue also offered a separate four-year Ladies' Course, longer than the course in the best female seminaries. In 1837 four young women who had prepared in Latin and Greek asked to enter the freshman college class as candidates for degrees; after 'a little hesitation' they were admitted. The catalogue made no announcement, listing them at first under a separate heading. Three of the four graduated in 1841, the first women in the country to receive arts degrees. (source)

The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue

John Price, a young Black man believed to have escaped from Kentucky, had been living in Oberlin for some months in 1858 when four strangers took rooms at an obscure tavern in town. With the help of a man who lived about four miles out, they hired his son, a boy of about thirteen, to lure Price out of town on Monday morning with an offer of good wages for farm work. A mile or more out, a carriage carrying one of the Kentuckians, a deputy U.S. marshal and a deputy sheriff from Columbus overtook them; the men seized Price and took the road to Wellington, nine miles south, to catch a train for Columbus and Cincinnati. The boy was paid twenty dollars. Two men coming from Pittsfield met the carriage and brought word to Oberlin, and probably two or three hundred people, white and Black, townspeople and students, went to Wellington that afternoon, where more joined them around the hotel. The captors kept Price in a garret room while the southbound train came and went. Near sunset a group in the upper room brought him down the stairs, the crowd passed him into a buggy, and it drove fast for Oberlin, where he was hidden two or three days and then sent on to Canada. (source)

Rescuers in the Cleveland jail

A federal court indicted 37 of the rescuers, among them the free Black cabinetmakers and upholsterers Wilson Bruce and Henry Evans, who had come to Oberlin from North Carolina in 1854. The accused agreed to wait in the Cleveland jail until their trial, which began on April 5, 1859. The first two tried, Simeon Bushnell, who was white, and Charles Langston, who was Black, were found guilty; several others pleaded no contest and received $20 fines and one-day jail sentences. Mass demonstrations followed each move of the court, and Joshua Giddings and Salmon P. Chase spoke on behalf of the Rescuers, as they came to be called. From jail the prisoners printed one issue of their own newspaper, The Rescuer, using type given them by the Cleveland Daily Leader; in it the Evans brothers advertised their upholstery shop with the line 'Government officials need not apply.' The last thirteen were released on July 6, 1859, after 84 days in jail, when Lorain County agreed to drop kidnapping charges against Price's captors if the federal prosecutions of the remaining rescuers were dropped. (source)

Timeline

• 1805: At Fort Industry on July 4, the Wyandot, Ottawa, Chippewa, Munsee, Delaware, Shawnee and Potawatomi ceded the Western Reserve lands west of the Cuyahoga, including the future Oberlin tract. (source)
• 1818: The first settlers of Russia Township, owned by Street and Hughes of New Haven, took up land in its northwest corner. (source)
• 1825: Russia Township was organized at the house of Daniel Axtell, with sixteen voters, all of whom attended. (source)
• 1832: Shipherd and Stewart, spending the summer in Elyria, planned a Christian colony and school, rode about eight miles south into the forest and chose the site. (source)
• 1833: On April 19 Peter P. Pease of Brownhelm moved his family into a log house near the elm on what became the college park, the colony's first settler. (source)
• 1833: The Oberlin Collegiate Institute opened on December 3 with about thirty students and two instructors, in departments below college level. (source)
• 1834: The legislature chartered the Institute in February, and a circular of March 8 promised to extend education 'to both sexes and to all classes of the community.' (source)
• 1834: In October the Institute opened a collegiate department for men and a female department. (source)
• 1835: On January 1, meeting at Elyria, the trustees agreed to hire Asa Mahan and John Morgan of Lane Seminary but put off the question of Black students. (source)
• 1835: In February, with the board evenly divided, chairman John Keep cast the deciding vote that 'the education of the people of color' should be 'encouraged and sustained' at Oberlin. (source)
• 1835: President Mahan, Charles Finney, Professor Morgan, the Lane rebels and the first Black students arrived that summer, and the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society was founded in June. (source)
• 1837: In September four young women were admitted to the freshman college class as candidates for degrees. (source)
• 1839: Short of money, the Institute sent trustee John Keep and William Dawes to England to raise funds, and closed for seven months in 1839-1840. (source)
• 1841: Three of the four women graduated, the first women in the country to receive a degree in the arts. (source)
• 1841: Oberlin townspeople stopped Kentucky claimants carrying off a fugitive couple; the two were jailed at Elyria and later escaped from the jail. (source)
• 1844: George Boyer Vashon became the Institute's first Black graduate. (source)
• 1850: The institute was renamed Oberlin College, and President Asa Mahan resigned. (source)
• 1852: The Toledo, Norwalk and Cleveland Railroad opened an Oberlin stop; until then travelers went by stage from the nearest station at Wellington. (source)
• 1854: Wilson Bruce and Henry Evans, free-born Black cabinetmakers from North Carolina, settled in Oberlin and began building the house on Mill (now Vine) Street. (source)
• 1858: On Monday, September 13, a deputy U.S. marshal's party seized John Price about 1.75 miles northeast of Oberlin and took him to the Wadsworth House hotel in Wellington, where a crowd from both towns took him back. (source)
• 1858: A federal grand jury indicted 37 rescuers, 24 from Oberlin and 13 from Wellington; they appeared in court at Cleveland on December 7. (source)
• 1859: At the trials in Cleveland, Simeon Bushnell got 60 days in jail and Charles H. Langston 20 days, and the Ohio Supreme Court, by a three-to-two ruling, upheld the Fugitive Slave Law against their habeas corpus appeal. (source)
• 1859: The last thirteen jailed rescuers, including the Evans brothers, were freed July 6 when Lorain County dropped kidnapping charges against Price's captors in exchange. (source)
• 1859: Rescuers Lewis Sheridan Leary and John A. Copeland and Oberlin resident Shields Green joined John Brown at Harpers Ferry; Leary was killed and Copeland and Green were hanged on December 16. (source)
• 1860: Oberlin erected a cenotaph to Green, Copeland and Leary, 'colored citizens of Oberlin.' (source)
• 1862: Mary Jane Patterson graduated with honors, the first Black woman to earn a B.A. degree. (source)
• 1924: On June 28, the day a tornado killed 62 in Lorain, Oberlin had its worst flood; children swam in Tappan Square. (source)
• 1937: For the centennial of women's entry to college work, a coeducation monument and the Memorial Gateway were built on the campus. (source)
• 1965: Oberlin College was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 21. (source)
• 1977: Cameron Armstrong's Underground Railroad Monument, a rail track rising from the ground, was installed on campus. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Oberlin College
• en.wikipedia.org: Oberlin, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: Oberlin%E2%80%93Wellington Rescue
• en.wikipedia.org: List of National Historic Landmarks in Ohio
• archive.org: oberlincolonycol00fairuoft djvu.txt
• archive.org: historyofoberlin00ship djvu.txt
• archive.org: historyoflorainc00phil djvu.txt
• npgallery.nps.gov: 66000615 text
• npgallery.nps.gov: 80003143 text
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Oberlin College