John was born on March 28, 1802 near Granville, New York, United States, the third son of Zebulon Rudd and Betsy (Bull) Shipherd. His father, a successful lawyer, served for many years as a trustee of Middlebury College and, for one term (1813 - 15), as a Federalist member of Congress.
He attended Pawlet Academy, Pawlet, Vermont, from which he soon transferred to Cambridge Academy, Cambridge, New York. He planned to complete his education at Middlebury College, but an accidental dose of poison so weakened his eyes and voice and so undermined his health generally that he was forced, for a time, to abandon the prospect of further study.
Middlebury College granted him an honorary master's degree in 1830.
After two years spent in unsuccessful ventures in the marble and whetstone industries at Vergennes, Vermont, however, he entered the household of Rev. Josiah Hopkins at New Haven, to prepare for ordination. Here he spent a year and a half, depending largely upon the eyes of others for his reading.
He was ordained as an evangelist by a Congregational council at Blanton, October 3, 1827, but after preaching for a year at Shelburn, in the autumn of 1828 he accepted the general agency of the Vermont Sabbath School Union and removed to Middlebury. For the next two years he traveled about the state, founding and inspecting Sunday schools; he also published a semi-annual, The Sabbath School Guide, and a tiny juvenile religious magazine, The Youth's Herald.
He had decided to go as a home missionary "to Mississippi's vast valley. " Accordingly, in the autumn of 1830, without waiting to secure an appointment, he went West, stopping at Rochester, New York, to receive the advice and blessing of Charles G. Finney.
Upon reaching Cleveland he was promptly assigned to the missionary pastorate of a Plan-of-Union Presbyterian church in the village of Elyria, Lorain County, Ohio. His experience here was checkered but generally disappointing to him, and in the summer of 1832, he collaborated with a classmate of Pawlet days, Philo P. Stewart.
In 1832-33 Shipherd traveled through New York and New England, securing money, teachers, pious settlers, and title to a tract of land nine miles from Elyria; while Stewart and other associates forwarded the enterprise on the spot. The first settlement was made in April 1833. Shipherd returned in September and presided at the opening of the preparatory and "infant" departments of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, December 3, 1833.
A full staff of teachers was secured the following spring, and in the fall, the first students of college grade appeared. The initial report of the Institute, published in December 1834, was optimistic, but Shipherd knew that the funds available were insufficient to guarantee the long continuance of the enterprise. The rebellion of the students at Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, furnished the means of saving Oberlin.
Under the leadership of Theodore Weld the students had begun the discussion of the slavery question and formed an anti-slavery society. The trustees, mostly conservative Cincinnati business men, prohibited further debate of this dangerous issue and the students walked out, almost to a man. Shipherd read of the situation in the religious periodicals and hastened to Cincinnati, where he discussed with the "rebels" and Rev. Asa Mahan, one of the friendly minority of the Lane trustees, the possibility of their coming to Oberlin.
In the spring of 1835 Mahan became president of the Institute and the Lane "rebels" arrived to study theology under Finney in the newly founded theological department. Oberlin was now firmly established as a center of reform and revival piety. After 1835, the leadership having passed to Finney and Mahan, Shipherd turned to the founding of other colonies and schools.
In 1844 he led personally the little group of people who established the colony and school at Olivet in Michigan. There, early in the autumn of the same year, he died.
John Jay Shipherd co-founded Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, formulated a scheme for the evangelization of the West through a Christian colony and manual-labor school to be founded in the wilderness. Under Shipherd's leadership, Oberlin College set important precedents of admitting both men and women without regard for race. Oberlin was the first co-educational college in the United States. His Grand River Seminary in Michigan and his Lagrange Collegiate Institute were also founded.
In 1824 he had married Esther Raymond of Ballston, New York, by whom he had a daughter who died in infancy, and six sons.
