My aim here is to introduce Oberlin's present campus planners to our predecessors. The Founders' Plan, launched in 1833, was to clear a 13-acre square north and west of Peter Pindar Pease's log house at the corner of College and Main and build a campus on it. Some half dozen college buildings of brick and stone once stood on the square, until the last of them was levelled in 1927. Meanwhile temporary wood-frame buildings, beginning in 1833 with Oberlin Hall on the present site of the Java Zone, went up along West College Street. This was the first master plan, modeled after an idealized 18th-century New England village.
Wars have a way of killing master plans.
After the Civil War, affluence hit the college for the first time, and Oberlin's Stone Age got under way. Warner Concert Hall, Warner Gym, and Peters in between, all of them facing east. The campus now had a domineering new western edge, the makings of an academic grand avenue. For the new century At the outset of his long presidency in 1902, Henry Churchill King asked the Olmsted Brothers of Boston, sons of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and distinguished campus designers in their own right, to provide the college with a master plan for the new century. The Olmsted Plan of 1903, the most far-sighted in Oberlin's history, charted a design whose main elements would endure to the present day.