Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States. It is located about southwest of Cleveland within the Cleveland metropolitan area. The population was 8,555 at the 2020 census. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.
The town is the birthplace of the Anti-Saloon League and the Hall-Héroult process, the process of reducing aluminum from its fluoride salts by electrolysis, which made industrial production of aluminum possible.
History
Oberlin was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers, John Jay Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. The pair had become friends while spending the summer of 1832 together in nearby Elyria and discovered a shared dissatisfaction with what they saw as the lack of strong Christian morals among the settlers of the American West. Their proposed solution was to create a religious community that would more closely adhere to Biblical commandments, along with a school for training Christian missionaries who would eventually spread throughout the American frontier. The two decided to name their community after Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740–1826), an Alsatian minister whose pedagogical achievements in a poor and remote area had greatly impressed and inspired them.
Shipherd and Stewart rode south from Elyria into the forests that then covered the northern part of Ohio in search of a suitable location for their community. After a journey of approximately eight miles, they stopped to rest and pray in the shade of an elm tree along the forest, and agreed that this would be a good place to start their community.
Shipherd traveled back east and convinced the owner of the land to donate of land for the school, and he purchased an additional for the town, at the cost of $1.50 per acre ($371/km2).
In 1834 a charter for the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute was obtained from the legislature of Ohio, and the institute adopted as its motto "Learning and Labor." The same year saw a freshman class of four students. In those days the words were taken quite literally: tuition at Oberlin was free, but students were expected to contribute by helping to build and sustain the community. This attracted a number of bright young people who would otherwise not have been able to afford tuition. The motto remains to this day.
During the mid-1800s African Americans, predominantly free people of color and runaway slaves, settled in the area.
In Oberlin's earliest years, transportation (especially for students) depended heavily on weather-dependent Lake Erie transportation routes; the nearest railroad passed through Wellington, and travellers were forced to rely on stagecoaches between that village and Oberlin. This situation changed in 1852 when the Toledo, Norwalk, and Cleveland Railroad opened a stop in Oberlin along its Grafton line. Fifteen years later, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway opened a new rail station along this line; no longer used for rail transportation, the depot has been converted for community use and sits at the center of a park.
On June 28, 1924, the worst flood in Oberlin history occurred on the same day that a tornado killed 62 people in Lorain. Afterward, the water was so deep that children swam in Tappan Square. Damage was caused to all of downtown Oberlin.
One of Oberlin's largest employers was the Federal Aviation Administration, which houses the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center overseeing the airspace of six states and a small part of Canada.
Abolitionism
Oberlin was not founded as an abolitionist town. Its status changed with the enrollment in 1835 of the Lane Rebels, a loose group of several dozen students coordinated by abolitionist Theodore Weld. They had withdrawn en masse from the new Lane Theological Seminary of Cincinnati because of its treatment of the Black community and opposition to abolition of slavery. Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, was not a city where free blacks were safe, nor did Cincinnati welcome fugitives.