Enter the Exhibit

It sometimes seems that you can’t walk for five minutes without running into another monument, memorial, or historic plaque in Oberlin. We pass by them every day; indeed, the monuments around us can be so familiar that they become almost invisible. But monuments can tell us a lot about a community if you really look at them.

Monuments can tell us about the ideas and people a community values, about how a community defines its identity, and even about the tensions that exist in a place. There are dozens of monuments in Oberlin, ranging from commemorative fountains, to small brass plates, to towering stone arches. So what can we learn from Oberlin’s memorial landscape?