Downtown Oberlin Walking Tour
of Civil War Monuments

Oberlin War Memorial

Main Tour

First Church (The Meeting House)

Wilson Bruce Evans House

Chauncey Wack House

Harper's Ferry Memorial

Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Monument

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Monument

Oberlin War Memorial

Giles Shurtleff Home and Statue

Extended Tour

Courtesy of Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization and Jonah Volk

Oberlin War Memorial, West Vine Street
Geoffrey Blodgett
Oberlin Architecture, College and Town -- A Guide to its Social History (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1985).

Oberlin’s monument to its war dead dates from 1943, but the longer history of the memorial goes back to the Civil War. The original design, proposed by Professor Charles H. Churchill in 1868, called for a Gothic tower crowned by a small astronomical observatory. College trustees found this plan too costly. The monument completed in 1871 was a similar but less ambitious structure with marble commemorative tablets embedded at the base of a sandstone spire. It stood on college ground at the southeast corner of Professor and West College streets. Its twentieth-century fortunes oddly reflected shifting attitudes toward commemorating war.

By the early 1930s the memorial looked like a crumbling medieval ruin and was nicknamed "the sunken church." Most Civil War veterans had died. Gothic forms had fallen out of style, and patriotic sentiment ran low in the wake of World War I. At the Memorial Day observance of 1934, pacifist college students interrupted the village ceremony by laying anti-war placards ("Schools, Not Battleships," "Transfer All War Funds to Aid of Needy Students") against the monument. A year later it was dismantled and its marble tablets placed in storage.

Then came World War II. Even before Pearl Harbor a drive got underway to build a new memorial at its present location away from the campus, overlooking Plum Creek in Wright Park. William Hoskins Brown designed a simple terraced wall of old brick to hold tablets, including the originals, honoring the Oberlin casualties of all wars since 1861. This was dedicated in 1943.

Over the next three decades the wall began to tilt under the pressure from the embankment behind it. Corrective repairs were attempted after the Korean War. During the Vietnam War a drive to replace the wall with a new design ended in failure. Then in 1979 a city council decision to tear it down mobilized the American Legion post to save it. The restoration project, headed by Carl Breuning, was complete in time for the town’s sesquicentennial celebration of 1983.

The monument remembers 96 casualties (town and college) of the Civil War, 11 townsmen killed in World War I, 16 in World War II, and 2 each in Korea and Vietnam.

The Inscriptions on the tablets and plaques are as follows:

A: To the men of Oberlin who have died in the service of our country.

B: Co. C., 7th OVI [Ohio Volunteer Army, the regiment from Oberlin]

E:

Alonzo E. Pellett, 1st Kan.	William Black, 54th Mass.	Henry Real, 54th Mass.
Edward Williams, 54th Mass.	William Mitchell, 54th Mass.	Harrison Nichols, 54th Mass.
Oliver B. Ridgeway, 54th Mass.	John Tillman, 55th Mass.	New Year B. Morris, 178th OVI
George Hallauer, 15th KT	Henry A. Brewster	Archibald McArthur
Charles More	Henry Sands	Edward M. West
Capt. William H. Connet	Lt. Herbert Kenaston

F: Esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. -Pericles

G: Our brave volunteers who fell in the war for the Union, 1861-1865.

H: Ringgold, Petersburg, Fort Harrison, Five Forts, Gold Harbor, Okistee, Port Hudson

I: Cross Lanes, Chattanooga, Winchester, Port Republic, Cedar Mountain, Antietam

J: Fredericksburg, Stone River, Gettysburg, Fort Wagner, Chicamauga, Pittsburg Landing

K: There abideth also an unwritten memorial of them graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. -Pericles

M: Korean Conflict
William R. Gaeubau, Willard B. Holmes
Vietnam Conflict
Warren T. Scott, Gene A. White