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, to a Wesleyan Methodist theological institute founded in 1845 at Leoni, near Jackson — a denomination that had split from the larger Methodist church specifically over 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 who had earlier helped run Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the boldest experiments in American education — among the first to admit Black students and women alongside white men. Mahan was elected to head the new Adrian College, and the first students walked into North and South Halls on December 1, 1859, a little over a year before 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, and the corridor through southern Michigan was laced with Underground Railroad routes carrying people toward freedom in Canada. A college built by abolitionists, run by an Oberlin man, planted in that particular soil, was very much a creature of its place and moment.

Adrian College is still here, still tied to the Methodist tradition, 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 history books — but it is worth knowing that this Lenawee County school was, quite literally, founded to be on a side.