The Grand Army of the Republic, begun nationally in 1866, was an organization for Union veterans of the Civil War intended to give mutual aid to members and to assist veterans’ widows and orphans.  Individual posts were operated following military procedure.  Oberlin had a post the following year (Lorain County News, March 6, 1867), but it apparently did not last very long.

Then, in 1883, Oberlin’s eventual post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Henry Lincoln Post #364, was formed.  The post was named for an Oberlin resident who had served with Company C., Seventh Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry.  Henry W. Lincoln, who had risen to the rank of Lieutenant while participating in all the engagements of his company from Cross Lanes through Antietam, had been discharged for disability in January, 1863, and died in Oberlin the following July 1. Oberlin’s post #364 was instrumental in providing support and a social outlet for Oberlin Civil War veterans from its first year until 1935.  In its founding year, 23 members of Elyria’s GAR post (the Richard Allen Post) who were residents of Oberlin began to find the distance between the two cities a hardship, and decided to start their own post.  The group met for the first time in August of 1883, their bylaws were approved by the Ohio GAR headquarters by September of that year, and afterwards they became an official post of the GAR.  For the next fifty years, the Henry Lincoln Post was active in the Oberlin community, giving money to relief funds and commemorating veterans and their families through grave markers and memorial services.  Membership reached a peak at around 1891, with 86 names on the roster (though only 57 members were in regular attendance).  Since the Henry Lincoln Post only admitted members who were veterans of the Civil War, after 1895, the membership began to decline as members died or moved away.  In 1935, the Post’s last active member remaining in Oberlin, George H. Houghton, passed on, and with his death came the end of the Henry Lincoln Post.

William E. Bigglestone’s unpublished “[preliminary] Guide to the Oberlin College Archives,” which was prepared as individual entry sheets in a three-ring binder during the early 1980s.  Also, Nicholas Gliserman’s research paper concerning the Grand Army of the Republic’s Henry Lincoln Post #364 (Oberlin, Ohio), written in the fall of 2006.