Oberlin College

Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, to the south and west of Cleveland. Oberlin is perhaps best known for being the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students. The population was 8,195 at the 2000 census.
The second largest employer in Oberlin (after the eponymous College), is the Federal Aviation Administration, which houses an Air Route Traffic Control Center in the town. This particular center is one of the most transitioned air traffic control centers in the country, and oversees the airspace over 6 states and a small part of Canada.

Oberlin is governed by a city manager and a seven-member council which is elected to two-year terms in a non-partisan election. The current city manager is Robert DiSpirito.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, Oberlin became a major focus of the abolitionist movement in the United States. The town was conceived as an integrated community, and blacks had attended Oberlin College from its early years. Many Oberlin College graduates were dedicated abolitionists who traveled throughout the South working to help slaves escape to the north.

In 1834, in response to a series of slavery debates at Lane Theological Seminary, the trustees of the Cincinnati, Ohio school voted to prohibit antislavery agitation among its students and faculty. As a result, the "Lane Rebels," a group of about 50 students, trustee Asa Mahan, and professor John Morgan, left the school. Arthur Tappan, financial agent of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, and co-founder John Shipherd saw an opportunity to solve Oberlin's financial problems by inviting the rebels (including Mahan and Morgan) to come to Oberlin. The rebels agreed under three conditions: that Oberlin accept students regardless of color, that Oberlin respect students' freedom of speech, and that Oberlin not "interfere with the internal regulation of the school." In the fall of 1835, Oberlin opened a new theology school with Asa Mahan as President, Charles Finney as Professor of theology, and the Lane Rebels among the first theology students.^*

By 1852, the town of Oberlin was an active terminus on the underground railroad, and thousands had already passed through it on their way to freedom. This effort was assisted by an Ohio law that allowed fugitive slaves to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, which protected them from extradition back to the southern states from which they had escaped. In 1858, a newly-elected Democratic state legislature repealed this law, leaving the fugitives around Oberlin vulnerable to enforcement of the Federal Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed southern slave-catchers to target and extradite them back to the South.

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 and jailed in neighboring Wellington, Ohio. A large group of Oberlin residents consisting of townspeople, students and faculty, set out for the Wellington jail to release Price from captivity.

Oberlin "Rescuers" outside the Cuyahoga County jail

Price was freed and eventually smuggled out of the country, but the authorities were not content to let the matter rest. United States President James Buchanan personally requested that the group (now referred to by sympathetic parties as "the Rescuers") be prosecuted, and 37 of them were eventually tried and convicted by an all-Democrat jury. The group appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, but on May 30, 1859, their petition was denied. Ultimately, they bargained with the prosecutors, who granted the group their freedom in exchange for the promise that they would stay out of Northern Ohio.

The political ferment resulting from the case led to a number of major protests throughout the northern part of the state, 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, his decision did little to prevent a number of Southern states from seceding, and America was soon embroiled in the Civil War.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 11.4 km² (4.4 mi²). 11.3 km² (4.4 mi²) of it is land and 0.1 km² (Less than 0.1 mi²) of it (0.68%) is water.