Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society

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Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society

Upon their arrival, the Evans brothers promptly opened a cabinetmaking establishment and joined the community’s multiracial abolitionist movement.

The Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society is dedicated to preserving the house of a Black Underground Railroad operative in Oberlin, Ohio, and to transforming it into a center focused on the struggle for equal rights and social justice. The Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society (aka Evans HHS) honors the legacy of Wilson Bruce Evans (1824-1898), Sarah Jane Leary Evans (1829-1898) and the

ir descendants. The Society seeks to situate this legacy in the context of the larger story of Oberlin, Ohio as a historic site in the continuing struggle for Black freedom, racial equality and social justice in America. A freeborn man of color trained in cabinetmaking in his birthplace of Hillsborough, North Carolina, Wilson Bruce Evans moved north to Oberlin in 1854 with his wife Sarah Jane Leary, his older brother Henry and Henry’s wife Henrietta Leary—Sarah Jane’s sister—and their children. In 1858 they both participated in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, which liberated the freedom seeker John Price from slave hunters. For their efforts, the Evans brothers and their fellow Rescuers spent three months in jail in Cleveland awaiting trial for violation of the federal Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859 Sarah Jane and Henrietta’s brother Lewis Sheridan Leary joined with their sister Delilah’s son John Anthony Copeland in John Brown’s Raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. During the Civil War, Wilson Bruce Evans enlisted in the Union army. Wilson Bruce and Sarah Jane Leary Evans had eight (or more) children, three of whom lived to adulthood: Cornelius, Julia Ann, and Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane, an 1890 graduate of Oberlin College married Thomas Sewell Inborden. The Inbordens were educators, and in 1895 they organized—and he became the first principal of—the Joseph Keasbey Brick Agricultural, Industrial and Normal School, a school for African Americans in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. The family regularly spent summers in Oberlin, however, and in 1941 ownership of the Wilson Bruce Evans House passed to Sarah Jane and Thomas’s daughter Dorothy Inborden Miller, also an educator. Dorothy was an astute custodian of the family legacy, and under her stewardship the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. In 1997, soon after her death, it was declared a National Historic Landmark. Today the Evans house at 33 East Vine Street sports an early twentieth-century front porch and a deteriorating section in the back, but the two-story brick core of the house is in good condition; its interior still displays the superb woodwork made and installed by Wilson Bruce Evans and his brother in the mid nineteenth-century. By establishing the Evans HHS in January 2021, the descendants of Wilson Bruce Evans and Sarah Jane Leary Evans have joined with Oberlin residents to restore the house for use by current and future generations as a museum and community educational resource. Standing across the street from Martin Luther King Park, the Evans Home looks out on monuments to the Oberlin-Wellington Rescuers, the Harpers Ferry Martyrs, and the Tuskegee Airmen, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. By 2024 the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society hopes to welcome the public into this beautiful building to learn more about a remarkable Black family and the history of the struggle for racial justice in this community and across the United States. Consider becoming a member or donating to our association!

06/14/2026

Evans HHS hosted a table at the Juneteenth Oberlin 2026 celebration on Saturday. Pictured here are Board members Donna Russell and Nancy Wall. Phyllis Yarber Hogan, Carol Lasser, and Gary Kornblith also staffed the table during the day.

06/12/2026

Today the Ozanne crew installed a trusses for the annex behind the original Evans house. Here are photos from different angles.

06/11/2026

Photo of stones recovered from the foundation of the original Evans House, built in 1848. These stones will be used on the "Path to Freedom" in our Interpretive Park.

06/08/2026

06/04/2026

After stabilizing the original wooden portion of the Evans House, the Ozanne crew yesterday successfully removed the scaffolding that had been in place to safeguard the building.

06/01/2026

Progress on the Comprehensive Rehabilitation! This phase includes construction of a new ADA accessible restroom, made possible in part by a grant from the Ohio History Connection’s History Fund. The History Fund is supported exclusively by voluntary donations of Ohio income tax refunds, sales of Ohio History "mastodon" license plates, and designated gifts to the Ohio History Connection. www.ohiohistory.org/historyfund.

05/30/2026

Safety First!

05/28/2026

The Evans HHS construction team gathered at the Evans House on May 27 to review progress and agree on next steps in the rehabilitation project.

05/21/2026

Work on replacement of the East Vine Street bridge has been completed so folks can once again drive past the Evans House and see the rehabilitation work currently underway.

05/15/2026

This event is free and open to everyone who wishes to attend in person. It will be broadcast over Kendal at Oberlin's in-house television channel ,but it won't be accessible over the web.

Address

P. O. Box 284
Oberlin, OH
44074

Website

https://evanshhs.org/

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