About Oberlin

Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States, 31 miles southwest of Cleveland. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.

The town is the birthplace of the Anti-Saloon League and the Hall-Hroult process, the process of reducing aluminum from its fluoride salts by electrolysis, which made industrial production of aluminum possible.

The population was 8,286 at the 2010 census.

Oberlin was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers, John Jay Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. 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. 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. The two decided to name their community after Johann Friedrich Oberlin (17401826), an Alsatian minister whose pedagogical achievements in a poor and remote area had greatly impressed and inspired them.
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