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By Bob Ratterman

Staff Writer

A group of men follow the stream bed through the woods. Up ahead, they spot a cabin in a clearing, smoke rising from the chimney. A man hails them and they talk for a while. The visitors are under orders from the state legislature to locate a college and a town somewhere in the area.

It is March 25, 1810, and the men are the trustees of the newly chartered Miami University, sent out to find a site for their new university ... and the town of Oxford.

The man they met was Zachariah DeWitt and the cabin they saw near the stream bed still stands on the property of Miami University as the oldest structure remaining in the community. DeWitt built the cabin sometime in 1804 or 1805, according to Dr. Phillip R. Shriver, president emeritus and retired history professor of Miami.

"It's the oldest point of beginning," Shriver said of the cabin.

When the trustees told DeWitt why they had come, he pointed up the hill, looking west approximately where Route 73 now exists, and recommended the place where Miami and the city of Oxford now stand.

"The trustees went up the hill and we still say 'Uptown' to this day," Shriver said.

That was the second attempt to find a location for Miami University, he said. An earlier effort, in 1809, had nearly located it in Lebanon, near where the Golden Lamb is found. The state was considering locating the university in Cincinnati, Dayton, Lebanon or Middletown. Icabod Corwin had offered land in Lebanon and it looked like that would be the one chosen.

One commissioner was not present when it was discussed, however, and the plan fell through.

On Feb. 6, 1810, the legislature directed the trustees to find a site and ordered that a township be established in the northwest portion of Butler County. They were to choose a site for the university and establish a town which was to be called Oxford, after the university city in England.

A month later, they were in the woods following a stream bed and came across Zachariah DeWitt's cabin.

The cabin stands to this day on its original site on university property near Route 73. It is under the care of the Oxford Museum Association, which undertook some work in 1970 to preserve it, by replacing some of its deteriorating logs to stabilize the structure. The association has now completed a major project to preserve the log homestead and open it to the public.

Shriver has wrapped himself in the history of the area since coming here as Miami President in the 1960s and has been involved in many preservation efforts as well as recording the history of the university and community. He has long supported efforts to preserve the site and spoke at the dedication of a historical marker highlighting the significance of the DeWitt Log House.

The cabin is isolated now, but Shriver hopes the university and museum association can balance the need for security and use of the site to create another place for people to see those locations which played a role in the formation of the area.

"The Miami trustees established the town, laying it out in a mile square. The streets were to bear the names of trees of the forest. The principal east-west street was to be High Street, as it is in Oxford, England and the north-south street was the be Main Street," Shriver said. "They wisely determined that the business area was to be at the center, with the university to the east and residential to the west, south and north. Early on, they determined that there was to be a botanical gardens on the northeast corner."

Those gardens remain today as Miami's "Formal Gardens" adjacent to the pond and picnic area between the Miami Inn and Marcum Conference Center.

Although the university was chartered in 1809 and a site found in 1810, it would be another 14 years before any classes would be held. A major part of any university's operation today is fund raising and so it was with starting one, except there was no alumni organization to approach. First would come a fund-raising effort unlike anything anyone today can imagine.

John W. Browne was the first employee of Miami University, hired as what today would be described as "development officer," but Shriver said another Miami historian, the late Walter Havighurst, called him "a beggar on horseback."

Browne's job was to ride around the country in search of start-up dollars for the new university. Shriver said he also brought back books for the university's library, some of which are still preserved there.

Growth did not come quickly to Miami University or the town of Oxford. By 1841, Shriver said, there were fewer than 1,000 people living here and only 250 men enrolled in the university. Other institutions of learning were appearing, however.

In 1849, the Oxford Female Institute started on the west side of town, now Miami's Oxford College building at the intersection of West High Street and South College Avenue.

In 1853, "The Western" opened on the east side of the community, now The Western College campus of Miami University. The unusual geographical juxtaposition of the name comes from the fact that The Western is on the east side because it refers not to local compass points but was originally a western program of Mt. Holyoke College.

The Oxford Female College was established on the northeast corner of the mile square by the Third Presbyterian Church of Oxford on what is now the site of the Marcum Center.

"The town was obviously an academic community," Shriver said. "There were five colleges here before the Civil War."

Miami University, however, is the one that led to the establishment of the town of Oxford and remains to this day, now nearly 200 years later.

"Miami attracted men of

quality," Shriver said.

In addition to presidents, Miami also provided an education for two of Abraham Lincoln's 10 cabinet officers; two of three admirals in the Union fleet; Confederate president Jefferson Davis' replacement; governors in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and California and numerous business and civic leaders around the country.

Miami University and the community of Oxford have often been at odds during the past nearly two centuries of their joint existence. There have been a variety of causes for those differences over the years but the link that has existed from the beginning has been a strong one and for many outsiders as well as Miami graduates all over the world, the image of one automatically conjures up images of the other.