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

Page 7 text:

Oberlin the engineer turned farmer and went among his people planting potatoes and setting out fruit trees. The crying need of the hour was for a supply of agri- cultural implements to break the chains of an earth-bound economy which tilled the iields much as they had been tilled in the days of Moses. It was the pastor himself who opened a little hardware shop where he doled out plows and shovels, to be paid for on the installment plan. As the years passed by, the peasants were gradually enticed into a small agricultural society which, Oberlin-inspired, farmed the glebeland, made butter, planted flax, and soon began to hold its head up among similar societies in France. Parallel to the process of labor ran the process of learning. In pre-Oberlin times, the schoolmaster had been an illiterate swineherd who had inherited the office when be became too ill to care for his swine. Under Oberlin, education took on the more modern guise of a school system, governed by a hierarchy of drill masters and sergeants which resembled the army he had loved as a child. General illiteracy rapidly faded away into past history as John Frederic solicited funds, built school- houses, and stamped out the rude native patois by requiring every school child to speak French. h So months became years, and years merged into decades. Children grew up into strong men and women and themselves became parents and still Oberlin labored on. One by one his original parishioners died and were buried in the little cemetery until, at the age of eighty-six Oberlin joined them. His people erected a simple headstone to Papa Oberlin over his grave, and the life of the man who had labored among them for over sixty years assumed a half-mystical, half-legendary character.

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'fri .VT .1 , 5. ff , lfml 1 ' I N kg ' S' IDEAL AS coNCE1vED i BY JOHN FREDERIC o.BERL1N Two centuries and three thousand miles from Oberlin today, John Frederic Ober- lin was born in the city of Strasbourg. Like his six brothers, he grew tall, studied hard, played soldiers, brushed with the town bully, and in the course of time graduated from the university. Un- like them, he journeyed as an impetuous young apostle to the region of the Ban de la Roche, where he strove all his life long to bring the word of God to the simple, half-savage peasants. Each Sunday, at the first tones of the bell, troops of vil- lagers began to Wend their way down the hillsides toward his tiny church. Even in the dark days of the French Revolu- tion, when public worship was forbidden, John Frederic dared to preach the love of Jesus Christ in the midst of anarchy and terror. From Monday to Saturday Oberlin the preacher became Oberlin the engineer. At first his superstitious people stared open-mouthed as stubborn boulders were blasted out with dynamite and the swift mountain streams surrendered to rudely-constructed bridges. Superstition forgotten, they and their pastor labored side by side. Blows of the pick-ax trans- formed the narrow mountain passes into wide roads embanked with stone, bridges replaced the slippery old tree-trunks which had sent many a traveler to a watery grave below. As the number of willing workers doubled and even tripled, Oberlin became supervisor, riding his horse up and down the ranks of workmen making suggestions, dismounting swiftly to help in a difficult spot.

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death, when John J. Shipherd and Philo drawing up plans for a Christian college in Shipherd suggested the name of Oberlin in 7?-honor of the fiery German pastor. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute opened its doors on December 3, 1833. Here in Ohio, half a world away from Alsace-Lorraine, the same prin- ciples of learning, labor, and brotherly love were to guide a community struggling against conditions equally adverse toward goals equally worthy. From the moment when Peter Pindar Pease stood the first boards against a tree near the Historic Elm to make a temporary shelter, it was a com- munity life based upon manual labor for all. The first men students worked in the fields at least four hours every day, while the first women students slaved just as hard, washing, ironing, sewing, and cooking. Far from providing a vacation from books and studies, summer time was study time, as students scattered all over the countryside during the winter months to teach what they were learning at Oberlin. IT BEGAN