Oberlin College and Conservatory

the Civil War" due to its reputation as a hotbed of abolitionism. In 1858, both students and faculty were involved in the controversial Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of a fugitive slave, which received national press coverage. Two participants in this raid, Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Anthony Copeland, along with another Oberlin resident, Shields Green, also participated in John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry. This heritage was commemorated on campus by the 1977 installation of sculptor Cameron Armstrong's "Underground Railroad Monument", a railroad track rising from the ground toward the sky, and monuments to the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and the Harper's Ferry Raid, which followed an 1841 incident in which a group of "fanatical abolition anarchists" from Oberlin, using saws and axes, freed two captured fugitive slaves from the Lorain County jail.
In 1866, James Fairchild became Oberlin's third president, and first alumnus to lead it. A committed abolitionist, Fairchild, at that point chair of theology and moral …