Excerpt from Oberlin: Its Origin, Progress and Results; An Address, Prepared for the Alumni of Oberlin College, Assembled August 22, 1860

In testimony of our fixed purpose thus to do, in reliance on divine grace, we hereunto affix our names.

These articles were thought to serve the purpose of bring ing together families, devoted not only to a common end, but agreeing in their views of practical duty and in the means of promoting religious education. After a few years, however, the Covenant was mainly laid aside, being found to be too specific to serve as a. General pledge of Christian purpose, and too general to be a guide to specific duty. It was often more difficult in a particular case to decide what the Covenant required, than what were the require ments of Christian benevolence. It seemed more whole some and more conducive to Christian unity to shorten rather than lengthen either the creed or the covenant.

The plan arranged, a name was required for the school and the colony. This was borrowed not from Oberlin the elegant scholar, but from Oberlin the Swiss pastor, rep resenting in his self-denying and efficient life that love toward God and that sympathy with man which the found ers of this school desired to establish and cherish here.

The school, although sufficiently grand in its conception to be called a university, according to the modern western fashion, was named the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, which remained its legal designation until the name was changed upon application to the legislature in 1850.

A place was found within the limits of the county where the plan was formed - a tract in an unbroken forest, entirely unappropriated by the early settlers of the county in con sequence oi its uninviting surface, lying on the belt of clay which traverses Northern Ohio from east to west, destitute of springs and rocks and hills, but with a soil of sufficient strength to sustain a varied forest. The advantages of the location were, the room it afforded entirely unoccupied, its location on the Western Reserve, in the midst of a grow ing population just beginning to feel the want of better schools, having an origin and antecedents which indicated that this want would grow with their growth, and the low price of the land, which was still held by Connecticut pro prietors. A portion of this land, three miles square - nearly six thousand acres - was purchased at the low rate of one dollar and fifty cents an acre, and resold at an advance of one dollar an acre, thus providing a fund with which to lay the foundations of the school. The original proprietors donated to the enterprise about five hundred acres in the center of the tract for the uses of the school. On this por tion the college buildings now stand, and the entire south western quarter of the village.

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