acres (2 km2) of land donated by Titus Street, founder of Streetsboro, Ohio, and Samuel Hughes, who lived in Connecticut.
Shipherd and Stewert named their project after Alsatian minister Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, about whom a book had just been published, which Stewart was reading to Shipherd. Oberlin had brought social Christianity to an isolated region of France, just as they hoped to bring to the remote Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio.
Their vision was:
A community of Christian families with a Christian school which should be "a center of religious influence and power which should work mightily upon the surrounding country and the world—a sort of missionary institution for training laborers for the work abroad"—the school to be conducted on the manual labor system, and to be open to both young men and young women. It was not proposed to establish a college but simply an academy for instruction in English and useful languages; and, if providence should favor it, in "practical Theology". In accordance …
