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

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In 1836, when the college was feeling the pinch of hard times, some visionary persuaded Mr. Shipherd that the manufacture of silk would solve all their financial problems and, at the same time, provide enough manual labor for all the students applying. Recitations were suspended for a week while 60,000 mulberry trees were set out. Unfortunately, a dry summer, combined with Ohio clay soil, spelled disaster for the enterprise. So, with Alsace-Lorraine as a focal point, the inspiration stemming from john Frederic Oberlin had world-wide and sometimes unexpected repercussions. The most characteristic struggle in the community that bore his name was the fight for the abolition of slavery. Originally adopted as a means of secur- ing badly-needed funds, the philosophy of abolition fitted neatly into the Oberlin conception of Christianity. The exhortations of prayer and pamphlet accompanied the more adventurous past-time of maintaining an Underground Railway Station for runaway slaves. In one year alone over three hundred and fifty slaves were cared for in Oberlin and shipped forward in safety to Canada. It was boasted further that no black man fleeing to Oberlin for safety was ever returned to bondage. Post-Civil War mechanization 'brought its inevitable changes. The next twenty-five years saw a steady expansion of the school and a steady modern- ization of the community as Oberlin acquired, one by one, a modern water plant, a sewage system, improved streets and sidewalks, and free mail delivery. The opening guns were fired in the temperance war as the town which had bragged in the 1870's that it had no grog shops met in a mass meeting in 1881 at which five hundred men signed the pledge.

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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

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