First Church was built by the Oberlin community in 1842-44 for the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), who served as its pastor, led Oberlin College’s Theology Department, and later became college president. In the mid-19th century, this Congregational church had one of the largest congregations and auditoriums west of the Alleghenies, and speakers including Margaret Atwood, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Twain, and Woodrow Wilson addressed the community in its Meeting House. Antoinette Brown graduated from the college’s Ladies’ Department in 1847 and then completed three years of study under Finney in the all-male Theology Department. She worshipped and led women’s prayer meetings at First Church, but the college denied her the Theology certificate because women were not considered suitable for ordination. In 1853, she was called to serve the Congregational church in South Butler, New York, becoming the first woman since New Testament times to be ordained as a Christian minister. After finding herself in conflict with the rigid orthodoxy of her church, she resigned in 1854. After marrying Samuel Blackwell in 1856, she embraced her role as wife and mother to five daughters while continuing as a popular orator and reformer for women’s rights, suffrage, and antislavery. In 1878, she became a Unitarian and preached in Unitarian churches. She wrote numerous books expressing her belief in sexual equality within the new evolutionary science pioneered by Charles Darwin. Oberlin College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 1908, and the United Church of Christ established the Antoinette Brown Award for outstanding clergywomen in her honor in 1975.