OBERLIN

city, Lorain county, northern Ohio, U.S., 35 mi (56 km) west-southwest of Cleveland. In 1833 the Rev. John L. Shipherd, a Presbyterian minister, and Philo P. Steward, a former missionary to the Choctaw Indians, founded the community and established the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (1833; designated a college after 1850) to train ministers and teachers for the West. The name was chosen to honour Johann Friedrich Oberlin, an Alsatian pastor and philanthropist. In 1886 Charles Martin Hall, an Oberlin alumnus, developed there the electrolytic process for producing aluminum cheaply. Oberlin College pioneered various reform movements, including coeducation and integration, and the city was a station on the Underground Railroad by which fugitive slaves escaped to freedom in Canada. The Anti-Saloon League was founded in Oberlin in 1893. The city is nestled amidst fertile farmlands; its economic and cultural life centres on the college and its famous music conservatory. Inc. village, 1846; city, 1950. Pop. (1990) 8,191.