[5] 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.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

[8] 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.

[7] 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.

[11] 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.

[22] 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.

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They had withdrawn en masse from the new Lane Theological Seminary of Cincinnati because of its treatment of the Black community and opposition to abolition of slavery.

The first Black enrolees, James Bradley and the brothers Gideon Quarles and Charles Henry Langston, did not enroll in Oberlin but in an affiliated school, the Sheffield Manual Labor Institute.

(Their younger brother John Mercer Langston, who in 1888 became the first black elected to the United States Congress from Virginia, also studied at Oberlin.)

[27] Fugitive enslaved people were assisted by a new Ohio law that allowed them to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, which protected them from extradition back to the Southern states from which they had escaped.

This situation came to a head with the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a pivotal event described in Nat Brandt's book The Town That Started the Civil War.

On September 13, 1858, a fugitive named John Price was captured by federal officials and held in neighboring Wellington, Ohio.

[27] A large group of Oberlin residents, consisting of both white and black townspeople, students, and faculty, set out for Wellington to release Price from captivity.

[27] The men took Price back from the arresting US Marshal, and eventually smuggled him to Canada, but the authorities were not content to let the matter rest.

United States President James Buchanan personally requested prosecution of the group (now referred to by sympathetic parties as "the Rescuers"), and 37 of them were indicted.

The political ferment resulting from the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue led to a number of major protests throughout the northern part of Ohio, and an unprecedented boost to the anti-slavery Republican party in the 1860 state elections.

The governor of Ohio wrote to the new Republican President Abraham Lincoln urging him to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law.

Though in point of fact Lincoln declined this request, this decision did not prevent Southern states from seceding, and America was soon embroiled in the Civil War.

Oberlin also lies on a paved bicycle and pedestrian path, the North Coast Inland Trail, which travels southwest to Kipton and northeast to Elyria.

[47] Since 2024, Oberlin is served by the EBus, a fare-free public transit bus route operating under contract by Slidr and support from LCT using electric vehicles making several stops across the city on a loop.