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is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States, to the south and west of Cleveland. Oberlin is perhaps best known for being the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students. The population was 8,195 at the 2000 census.
The second largest employer in Oberlin (after the eponymous College) is the Federal Aviation Administration, which houses an Air Route Traffic Control Center in the town. Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center is one of the most transitioned air traffic control centers in the country, and oversees the airspace over six states and a small part of Canada.
Oberlin is governed by a city manager and a seven-member council which is elected to two-year terms in a non-partisan election. The current Oberlin city manager is Eric Norenberg. The current City Council President is David Sonner with Jack Bauman serving as vice president.
Oberlin was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers, John 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 out all over the American frontier. The two decided to name their community after Jean-Frédéric Oberlin (1740 - 1826), an Alsatian minister whose pedagogical achievements in a poor and remote area had greatly impressed and inspired them.
Shipherd and Stewart rode south from Elyria into the forests that covered the northern part of Ohio in search of a suitable location for their community. After a journey of approximately eight miles, they stopped to rest and pray in the shade of an elm tree along the forest, and agreed that this would be a good place to start their community. Legend has it that while they prayed, a hunter saw a family of bears climb down from a nearby tree. The bears saw the two men, but turned away without harming them. On hearing this story from the hunter, the two ministers took it to be a sign from God that they had selected the right place for their community and school.
Shipherd travelled back East and convinced the owner of the land to donate 500 acres (2 km²) of land for the school, and he also purchased an additional 5000 acres (20 km²) for the town, at the cost of $1.50 per acre ($371/km²). While in that part of the country, he visited many of his friends and persuaded some to join in his adventure, and others to contribute money towards the construction of the community.
The motto of the new college was "Learning and Labor". In those days the words were taken quite literally: tuition at Oberlin College was free, but students were expected to contribute by helping to build and sustain the community. This attracted a number of bright young people who would otherwise not have been able to afford tuition. Eventually this approach was deemed inefficient; the motto, however, remains to this day.
On June 28, 1924, the worst flood in Oberlin history occurred on the same day that a tornado killed 62 people in Lorain. Afterwards, the water was so deep that children swam in Tappan Square. Damage was caused to all of downtown Oberlin.