Oberlin College - Hi-O-Hi Yearbook (Oberlin, OH)

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Oberlin's history has been a history of honorable progress, of great motives and great men, of fearless faith in God, and steadfast- ness to His Word. Wfith such foundation, such motives, such men, such a faith, Oberlin has every title and every right to a just pride in her history. She stands to-day better than she ever was before, com- bining all the good of past achievement with the spirit and determina- tion of future progress. The old and the new, inseparably united, and working with but one end in VTCWV-GBERLIN FOREVER. fx Rev. Samuel Fuller Porter, O. T. S., '36, en- joys the honor of being the oldest living gradu- ate of Gberlin. He is further honored by be- ing the last survivor of that memorable group of students who came to Oberlin from Lane Sem-- inary, Cincinnati, Qhio, and formed the first class of students of a c t u a l College rank. The Rev. Mr. Porter was born in Wfhitestown, N. Y., September IS7, 1813, and took his un- dergraduate xv o r lc a t Uneida Institute. Ever since his graduation here. he has been engaged, until very recently, in some form of religious work, serving variously as Volunteer Chaplain during the last year of the VVar, as a Missionary in the West, and as Pastor of Congre- gational churches throughout the country. He is now living at 26 South Pleasant Street. Oberlin, Ohio. 21 QBhe1fIin's Qblhest cbrahuate

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bebentpiihe years nf 1Brngre55 second to none in the matter of scholarship. It is hoped that this added honor may serve as a legitimate stimulus to increased effort along academic lines. Another field of interest in which Oberlin has made very marked gains is that of athletics. The College athletics are now on a higher plane of sportsmanship than ever before. A wholesome interest in athletics has been encouraged to a point of heathfulness which promises nothing but the best. The various teams have been uniformly successful, and have received much praise wherever they have been for the clean, virile, manly game they have played. Thus the year has been one of noteworthy achievement, of steady growth, of wholesome expansion. H And so it is that, as we come to the time set apart for the ob- servance of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of this great College, our thoughts turn back to those early days when conditions were not as they are now, back to that bright, sunny day in the Spring of 1833 when the doors of the little slab hall were thrown open to the world, and the first students in Oberlin Colle- giate Institute began their work. No one then dared dream that seventy-five years thence thousands of loyal, loving friends and Alumni would gather on the self-same spot to commemorate in fit- ting measure those deeds of bravery and self-sacrifice. The hardy pioneer fathers who hewed out a small section in that vast and swampy wilderness and built the first rough cabins from the logs felled by their own hands, little thought that their tiny clearing would some day become a beautiful College town, that those paths through the woods were the rude beginnings from which should grow long avenues of elms and maples, overarching broad, paved streets 5 that those log cabins were in future years to be succeeded by massive, ivy-covered stone buildings. No more did Father Shipherd and his littleqband of prayerful followers, met on that memorable night in- 183 5, realize that in their deliberations was weighed a cause which was later to shake the nation to its very foundations. But unpropi- tious as were the first beginnings, weary as were those long, toilsome days when the man with the ax was busy from morn till night, hum- ble as were those cabins when compared with our more modern and stately stone structures, few as were the students during the first infant days of our Alma Mater, those great principles, those long, weary, labor-laden hours, those humble cabins and those few, hardy freedom-loving men and women were the touchstone from which the modern Oberlin with all her glory was to spring. 20 he . won of 1 gat 26 I

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