Adrian College and its abolitionist beginnings

The college that anchors the south side of Adrian was, from its first day, a school with a cause. Adrian College was chartered on March 28, 1859, but its roots go back further. It grew out of a Wesleyan Methodist theological institute founded in 1845 at Leoni, near Jackson. The Wesleyans were a denomination that had split from the larger Methodist church over one issue: slavery. When that school moved to Adrian and became a college, it carried its convictions with it.

The man who led it there made the point unmistakable. The first president was Asa Mahan, a prominent abolitionist and reformer. He had earlier helped run Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the boldest experiments in American education. Oberlin was among the first schools to admit Black students and women alongside white men. Mahan was elected to head the new Adrian College. The first students walked into North and South Halls on December 1, 1859. A little over a year later, the country tore itself apart over the very questions the school was founded on.

That heritage was not abstract in this county. Lenawee was thick with Quakers and antislavery families. The corridor through southern Michigan was laced with Underground Railroad routes carrying people toward freedom in Canada. Here was a college built by abolitionists, run by an Oberlin man, planted in that particular soil. It was very much a creature of its place and moment.

Adrian College is still here, still tied to the Methodist tradition. It’s a busy liberal-arts campus where students cut across the quad between the same kind of brick halls. The slavery fight that called it into being has long since passed into the history books. But it is worth knowing that this Lenawee County school was, quite literally, founded to be on a side.