We love visiting college campuses for cultural activities, beautiful art, historic buildings and green spaces.
The pretty little campus at Ohio Northern University (ONU) in Ada, Ohio, offers a lot of the amenities and activities you might expect from a larger school, along with a friendly, small-town atmosphere.
Henry Solomon Lehr, a Civil War veteran and Ada schoolmaster, jockeyed his schooling around working full time, eventually graduating with a PhD from eastern Ohio's Mount Union College while he worked in Ada. His experiences as a student shaped his belief that colleges should offer schedules and classes that students who needed to work and support themselves could more easily fit into their lives.
As Ada's schoolmaster in 1866, Lehr began offering evening "select school" classes for students wanting education beyond the basic school curriculum. The classes were popular and the town supported Lehr's request for money to buy land and construct a building for the "select school", which opened as Northwest Ohio Normal School in 1871.
The normal school (or teachers' college) had nearly 150 students and accepted women as students and faculty from the very beginning.
The school grew through the late-nineteenth century, expanding beyond training public school teachers by establishing separate colleges for business, engineering, pharmacy and law during the 1880s and becoming Ohio Normal University in 1885.
State funding for the school dried up in 1899. In 1900, Lehr sold the school to the United Methodist Church in order to save it, and the school remains a private, Methodist-affiliated institution today.
In 1903, the school became Ohio Northern University.
School officials expanded the school in the early 1900s, establishing a medical school with the Fort Wayne College of Medicine in Indiana in 1904 and adding an Agricultural College in 1911. By the 1930s, ONU dropped disbanded the medical school, agricultural school and a high school prep program.
ONU began growing again after World War II, with recent years bringing some of ONU's biggest developments, like the building and opening of an inn and conference center on campus in 2008.
ONU has 20 varsity sports, and its Polar Bears compete in NCAA's Division III. We were particularly impressed with the school's vintage-2004 Dial-Roberson stadium situated on the west campus, an area formerly home to the defunct agricultural school's farm.
The fact that ONU retained ownership of the farm after its agricultural program's 1923 dissolution contributes to its spacious feel and room for outdoor facilities like an 18-hole disc golf course (established in 2003) and the school's fabled "Green Monster".
The Green Monster began as a 2.5-mile jogging path around the campus in 1991, earning its nickname when physical education students dubbed it "a monster of a walk" during classes.
In 2007, donors placed 12 western-themed, cast-bronze statues of works by artists like Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and James Fraser along the path. Ten of the works are Remington reproductions, and many refer to that section of the path as the Remington Walkway.
ONU has plenty of other attractions for culture fans with a number of public art pieces on the central campus, the Freed Center for the Performing Arts (featuring an eclectic schedule of music, dance, plays, lectures and other stage shows) and the Elszy Gallery of Art.
We spent a lot of our time there wandering campus and taking pictures. We also managed to dodge the raindrops the weekend we visited to find one of several geocaches hidden on campus.
Today, ONU has about 3,600 students. The school offers 70 different majors, and its highly regarded academic programs helped to place it second among 371 Midwest Regional Colleges in U.S. News' "America's Best Colleges 2012" ranking.
Check out my story about The "football capital of the world" at Ada, Ohio come back later this week for my review of the Inn at Ohio Northern University.
You can also follow ONU on Twitter and Facebook.
Want to learn more about the history of Ada? Check out Hardin County (Postcard History) by Ronald I. Marvin Jr.
© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved
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