Administrative/Biographical History
John Keep was born in Long Meadow, Massachusetts, on April 20, 1781 to Samuel and Sabina (Cooley) Keep. He graduated from Yale in 1802, and was pastor in Blandford, MA and in Homer, New York from 1805 until 1833, when he came to Cleveland to become pastor of a new church on the West side. While he was at Homer he had been a trustee of Hamilton College and of Auburn Theological Seminary. In 1834 he was elected a trustee at Oberlin Institute, and held that position until his death in 1870. By reason of his years and experience he was made Chairman of the Board of Trustees in 1834-35 and 1850-52, and had the responsibility of casting the deciding vote on the question of receiving African American students in 1835.
Rev. Keep was also made the Institute’s financial agent, and as such he began by giving $1000 of his own funds to the treasury, and within a year obtained pledges of $64,000. However, the Panic of 1837 caused all but three to retract their pledges. To secure funds for the fledgling Institute, John Keep and William Dawes travelled to England in 1839, where slavery had been abolished ten years prior. Keep and Dawes called upon proponents of anti-slavery for support, attended the Anti-slavery convention in London in 1840, and returned after a year and a half with $30,000. For his service Keep received forty acres of “unimproved land” from the Institute, worth $10 per acre. He returned to preaching for nine years, after which he returned and devoted himself to the task of raising $100,000, Oberlin’s first real endowment.
John Keep married Lydia Hale, daughter of Judge Nathan Hale of Goshen, Connecticut in about 1805. They had a son, Theodore John Keep, born in 1809, who attained the theological degree at Oberlin in 1836. The Keep family moved to Oberlin in 1850. Rev. Keep died at Oberlin on February 12, 1870.
Sources Consulted
James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin: The Colony and the College, 1833-1883 (Oberlin, OH: E.J. Goodrich, 1883).
Theodore T. Munger, “An Old-time Hero,” The Congregationalist and Christian World, 22 September 1906: 367.
Trustee file of John Keep, Alumni Records, RG 28/3, Box 10.
Finding aid to the John Keep Papers, Library of Congress, 2010.
Author: Anne Cuyler Salsich Forms of Material (links to similar genres) Administrative InformationNot accessioned.
Letters Received by Oberlin College, Treasurer’s Office, RG 7.
Personal Papers of Robert S. Fletcher, RG 30/24.
