Last August, Mother Jones magazine ran a spread on campus activism that included a timeline of “Student Activism Firsts.” 

It was a fluff piece, obviously thrown together pretty quickly and without much interest in historical accuracy, and like many such pieces it treated student activism as something that began in the sixties. I took a few notes with the idea of putting up an annotated version of the timeline, pointing out some of the more obvious mistakes, but I never got around to finishing it.

As I was preparing the Hillary Clinton/Carry Nation story last month, though, I stumbled across something that really jumped out at me.

In the course of researching that post, I Googled temperance campus prank photo, trying to remember what campus the Carry Nation prank had taken place on. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find this.

That’s the index of the Oberlin College Archives, and as I flipped through it looking for temperance materials, I stumbled across a reference to a folder titled “Temperance ‘Sit-in,’ 1882.”

Huh.

The Mother Jones timeline included the following entry:

“First Sit-In 1960: Black students sit at whites-only lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.”

I knew this was wrong in a bunch of different ways: The lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 started in Greensboro, North Carolina, not Jackson, Mississippi; there had been other anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins in the late 1950s; and students had used sitting in as a protest tactic pretty regularly in the 1930s as well.

But 1882? Temperance? This was news to me.

The Oberlin archive index doesn’t include any detail beyond the titles of folders, so I made a note of the story. A few days ago I picked it back up again and poked around a bit more, eventually landing at the online archives of the New York Times. 

I plugged in “Oberlin” and “alcohol” to the Times search engine, and limited my search to the years 1881-1883. I got two hits, and those hits gave me a name that I was able to go back to Google with. Here’s what I learned:

The city of Oberlin, Ohio was dry in the early 1880s — there were no liquor stores or saloons in town. There was, however, a drugstore operated by a man named Bronson that dispensed alcohol “on the order of a physician.”

Temperance campaigners believed that Bronson was using this practice as a cover for serving whiskey in his fountain drinks, particularly to students from Oberlin College. Unfortunately, they had no proof.

So in order to keep tabs on Bronson, they sent volunteers to loiter in his store. Two at a time, in shifts of an hour each, the anti-alcohol activists would park themselves on Bronson’s chairs and observe him as he served his customers.

After a couple of weeks of this, Bronson got tired of having teetotalers lounging around glaring at his clients, and got rid of the chairs. The observers kept coming, until one evening when a shift brought their own stools to sit on. This was too much for Bronson, and he threw them out.

At that point the mayor of Oberlin, a temperance campaigner, saw an opportunity. Declaring his desire to avoid a disturbance in the drugstore, he deputized thirty anti-alcohol townspeople to serve as “marshals” to guard the store. While they were there, of course, they carried on surveilling Bronson, and eventually he seems to have buckled, though I haven’t quite been able to confirm that yet.

So no, this wasn’t the nation’s first student sit-in, despite the tantalizing title on the folder. Undergrads were the primary clientele for Bronson’s booze, and the campaigners appear to have been community members trying to control student behavior, not students attempting to combat a moral evil.

It’s an interesting story, though, and it illuminates a side of campus-community relations that I don’t know much about. The next time I’m in north-central Ohio I’m going to stop by the Oberlin College Archives and take a quick look at that folder.