The Oberlin Oral History Project
The Oberlin Oral History Project began in the early 1980s as an offshoot of the City's Historic Preservation Commission. Although the Commission's first duty was and is to protect and preserve Oberlin's historic buildings, it was becoming apparent that the townspeople's history was going unrecorded, especially that of a small group of African-American citizens who were then reaching their 70s and 80s and who provided family links to the earliest pre-Civil War Oberlin African-American families. It became increasingly important to preserve Oberlin's historic legacy as an interracial town hospitable to fugitive slaves, a stopover point on the Underground Railroad, and a place for a substantial number of African-Americans to reside permanently.
The oral history project began with a small group of volunteer interviewers who were familiar with Oberlin history. This group identified and interviewed twenty-five black and white residents who had played important roles in Oberlin's interracial history. Within a year, the project developed into a community-wide volunteer effort and its focus expanded to include a broad spectrum of themes in addition to inter-racial history. Volunteers from Oberlin College and the community taped more than 80 interviews of various lengths. (Not all were transcribed.) By the end of the 1980s when the project slid to a halt, a sizeable collection of audiotapes and transcriptions had been collected.
In January 1994 a task force of volunteers revived it under the supervision of Oberlin Heritage Center executive director Pat Murphy. Some were students from an Oberlin College winter term project. The students and community volunteers began the first inventory and reorganization of the oral history collection, now housed in the Oberlin Heritage Center. They organized a public program that included vignettes from several of the original interviews that focused on the theme of growing up in Oberlin.
During this process it became apparent that a great deal of important community history was imbedded in the project's tapes and transcripts. But it was also abundantly clear that a great deal of follow-up work would be required to successfully conclude the project. Various problems meant that the unwieldy collection of valuable material required significant additional work to make it accurate and accessible.
In the late 1990s a new oral history committee formed to make this large oral history project available to historians, scholars and the general public. The current oral history committee is chaired by Dina Schoonmaker and includes members Fran Baumann, Nancy Gray, Pat Holsworth, Jeanne McKibben, Marly Merrill and Priscilla Steinberg. To date, with the help of Heritage Center staff and student interns, they have checked and corrected existing transcriptions against audio tapes of interviews, made new transcriptions (when none existed) from audio taped interviews, and collected photographs, newspaper accounts, and/or obituaries to include in each interviewee's file. All of the audio tapes have been copied and are now stored in a climate controlled environment. All corrected transcriptions have been digitized as well as made into a set of archival printed copies and a set of printed copies for public use. Missing release forms have been searched for and obtained from family members of some deceased interviewees.
One of the outgrowths of this project was the acclaimed Wallpaper Project, a theatrical production based on oral histories that incorporated parts of the Oberlin Oral History Project into dramatic presentations as part of a statewide tour in celebration of Ohio's bicentennial in 2003. Excerpts from these interviews were also featured in a program, “Fun in Oberlin, Past and Present,” by Daniel and Elizabeth Goulding at the Oberlin Heritage Center Annual Meeting in 2004 and at Kendal in 2006.
Now that the original project has been completed, the committee and staff will start to index the interviews (by subject and name) to make the collection more accessible to future scholars and family members. The Oberlin Oral History Project will then become a community resource as rich in individual and family history as in town and national history. Interviewees recall a wide variety of subjects among them: race relations, city politics, downtown development, recreation, school experiences, and the relationship between town and gown. The Oberlin voices in this collection are black and white, men and women, business and college people, farmers and laborers.
Phase 2 of the oral history project began in 2001 when the committee generated a new list of prospective interviewees. As of January 2008 there are nineteen transcripts from Phase 2 in our files. We hope to add at least twelve new oral histories per year to our collection. The committee is also planning for future programs and projects to continue to bring this important and previously untold multi-dimensional record of our community’s rich and diverse history to the public.
A list of oral histories available at the Oberlin Heritage Center Resource Center can be found here.
Our long-running Oral History Project is still a vital part of our mission to preserve Oberlin's unique history. A group of our wonderful volunteers make up our Oral History Committee, chaired by Dina Schoonmaker. They are working hard to record and share Oberlin residents' many stories and memories.