Oberlin was to be a pious, simple-living community, a colony in a lightly-inhabited area, in which the school, training ministers and missionaries, would be the centerpiece. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute was founded in 1833 by Shipherd and another Presbyterian minister, Philo Stewart, "formerly a missionary among the Cherokees in Mississippi, and at that time residing in Mr. Shipherd's family," who was studying Divinity with Shipherd. The institute was built on of land specifically donated by its owners, Titus Street, founder of Streetsboro, Ohio, and Samuel Hughes, who lived in Connecticut. Shipherd and Stewert named their project after Alsatian minister Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, on whom a book had just been published, from which Stewart was reading to Shipherd. Oberlin brought social Christianity to an isolated region of France, just as they hoped to bring it to the then-remote Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio.