John Keep Reference Collection, 1781-1929
| Oberlin College Archives
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.
In 2012 an Oberlin College student, Sonia Roubini, visited the Manuscripts Division in the Library of Congress to photograph items in the John Keep Papers, 1781-1929 at the request of Oberlin faculty members in consultation with the Oberlin College Archivist. The John Keep papers had been given to the Library of Congress by Helen E. Keep, great granddaughter of John Keep, from 1929 to 1954. The finding aid from the Library of Congress is accessible from http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms010204.
Roubini photographed at least one page of each of the 14 items in Box 1 listed in the Library of Congress finding aid. The student did not photograph a Bible dated 1847 in Box 2. Missing are any more than the title page of Keep’s autobiography, 1781-1866, and the cover of his record book dated 1847 of subscriptions for the purchase of the Cleveland American and for the publication of a Liberty Party paper in Cleveland, Ohio. Digital copies of the letters, clippings, notes and speeches appear to be complete.
The digital images were printed out in both black ink and color inks to form two sets of copies. The color set is far more legible and represents the originals more faithfully.
The papers of John Keep are also described in the Library of Congress Information Bulletin 14, no. 1 (3 January 1955): 2.
INVENTORY
NOTE: Copies cannot be made without permission from the Library of Congress. Each image was printed out in color and in black ink to form two complete sets.
Box 1
Autobiography of the Reverend John Keep, 1781-1866, copied by his great grand-daughter,
Helen Keep, from the original (copy of cover page only).
Brass plate portrait of John Keep, n.d.
Letters
John Keep to Levi Burnell, Albion, New York, January 11, 1839 (transcription) (3 pages)
“Dear Brother,” Hartford, March 7, 1843 (transcription)
Hiram Osborn, Kentucky, to John Keep, Oberlin, Ohio, August 1, 1960 (2 pages, copies
of originals)
Letter to John Keep from unknown writer, Boston, MA, July 11, 1868 (copy of original)
Newspaper clippings
Clipping, The True American (Cortland County, New York), November 25, 1846
Clipping, Morning Leader (Cleveland?), February 10, 1865
Notes Relating to Rev. John Keep and William Dawes of Oberlin Ohio, collected by Helen
E. Keep, Detroit, Michigan, May 1929 (7 pages)
Record book, 1847 (image of cover only)
Speeches
John Keep, “Relation of the Churches in the United States to Slavery; and Their Duty in
Reference to It,” A Report of the Hudson Convention, January 1847, and back page
with Liberty Hymns. (8 pages)
“John Keep, presented by friends of the Slave in Lake County, Ohio, April, 1847.”
“The Barbarism of Slavery.” Speech of Hon. Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, delivered in the U.S.
House of Representatives, April 5, 1860. (first page only)