We know it as a catalyst for the wonders of fourth meal, as well as a first-year haven of respite and partying. Dascomb Hall sits unobtrusively in the middle of campus, but it feeds us and houses us: it gets the job done.

Dascomb was built in 1956 as a part of a building project initiated after the Second World War by College President William Stevenson. The era brought on a frenzy of construction in an attempt to accommodate the school’s rapidly increasing student body. The same Cincinnati architects, Potter, Tyler, Martin & Roth, built Dascomb and its fraternal twin Barrows, and East and South Halls.

“When one recalls the dozens of aging wooden houses torn down to make room for [the new buildings], they can be called Oberlin’s campus version of urban renewal,” said the late Professor Geoffrey Blodgett in his book, Oberlin Architecture, College and Town: A Guide to its Social History.

Unlike many of the buildings on campus, Dascomb bears the name of not a man, but a woman. The building memorializes Marianne Parker Dascomb, a prominent figure in the former “Female Department” of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute.

Robert Samuel Fletcher writes in his book, History of Oberlin College, that Dascomb’s husband, Dr. James Dascomb, was summoned to campus by John Jay Shipherd, founder of the College. Dascomb was recommended as both a science teacher and a physician. He later became Oberlin’s first doctor.

James Dascomb was not the only Dascomb sought after in Oberlin; Marianne Dascomb also had skills that were in high demand at the new institution.

Marianne Dascomb graduated from the Ipswich Female Seminary at Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1833. She had studied there under Zilpah Polly Grant and Mary Lyon, both of whom had been taught by Joseph Emerson.

Fletcher quoted Emerson, who believed that women should learn more than simply ornamental tasks: “Females are the foundation of society; they need some judgment, energy, and vigor. They may be, and ought to be also, polished. The education of both sexes is committed to them.”

With these principles in mind, Dascomb headed the Female Department of Oberlin from 1835 to 1836 and from 1852 to 1870. According to Fletcher, the Female Department was founded to co-exist with the rest of the College. However, when College classes began in 1834, women were already participating. Oberlin was, and forever would be, co-educational. At the time, the concept had not yet spread to higher education, establishing Oberlin as progressive from the start.

Dascomb herself, though, was rather conservative. Her second term as Lady Principal, or leader of the women, sought to remedy the corruption of the principal before her, Mary Sumner Hopkins, who was fired for kissing a male student. The student told the Ladies’ Board and Sumner was quickly released from her duties.

Dascomb was appointed with the hope that she would provide the school with a leader not only as popular as Hopkins, but also possessing more tact and reserve.

“We, today, would consider her extremely ‘straight-laced,’ but her Irish wit seems to have saved her from unpopularity,” said Fletcher in his book.

Fletcher also quotes students as describing Dascomb to be “well fitted in heart, mind and manners for the responsible station.”

Many also felt personal affection toward her.

“Mrs. Dascomb, the principal, just came in to invite me to a meeting,” wrote another student in a letter to her mother. “We all love her.”

Dascomb was also heavily involved in the Oberlin community. She was a member of the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, which existed to “promote and sustain moral purity among the virtuous” in aspects of both manners and religion.

Dascomb also held with an egalitarian and respectful racial politic. She supported her colleague Alice Cowles in her complaint that a white girl should not perform a dialogue on slavery in black face. Although the girl was allowed to continue, Dascomb, according to Fletcher, was not pleased.

In an act uncharacteristic of today’s Oberlin spirit, however, Dascomb helped to organize local opposition to woman suffrage. She led 140 married women in the county to file a protest against the suffrage movement.

“Mrs. Dascomb did her own thinking,” said an article in the Oberlin News-Tribune on Friday, March 29, 1935.

What would she think of her namesake building today?