Wilson Bruce Evans House

The Wilson Bruce Evans House, 33 East Vine Street, is a rare example of a residence built and occupied by an African American abolitionist and Underground Railroad operative. Free-born in North Carolina, Wilson Bruce Evans (1824-1898) moved to Oberlin in 1854. A skilled cabinetmaker, he opened a carpentry shop with his brother, Henry (1817-1886). Together they completed the original house by 1856. At the center of Oberlin’s interracial antislavery politics, Evans defied the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and was indicted for his part in the 1858 Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. During the Civil War, Evans enlisted in the predominantly white 178th O.V.I., serving August 1864-June 1865. The Wilson Bruce Evans House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and named a National Historic Landmark in 1997. (Continued on the other side)

[Side B]: (Continued from the other side) Wilson Bruce Evans and his wife, Sarah Jane Leary Evans (1829-1898), lived in Oberlin for over 40 years raising three children to adulthood: Cornelius (1855-1941), Julia (1859-1925), and Sarah Jane (1866-1928). Julia graduated from Oberlin College in 1880 and married James William Johnson, a music educator who studied in Oberlin 1875-1879. They taught in Ohio and Indiana. Sarah Jane graduated from Oberlin College in 1890 and married Thomas Sewell Inborden, a boarder with the family while he attended Oberlin. Together, they founded the Brick School in Enfield, North Carolina. When Cornelius died, the Inbordens’ daughter, Dorothy Inborden Miller (1897-1996), inherited the Evans House. She worked to preserve and document its rich legacy. In 2021, descendants joined local historians to establish the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society.