KEEP, IMLA (?-?). Imla Keep, one of Stephen F. Austin's^qv Old Three Hundred^qv colonists, doctor, and Brazoria County planter, may have lived in Mississippi before moving to Rapides Parish, Louisiana, where he practiced medicine and operated a plantation from 1819 to 1824. For a time he had a profitable practice, but he became increasingly interested in his planting and gradually lost his patients, a fact that may have moved him to join the Austin colony in Texas. Keep received title to a league of land now in Brazoria County on July 24, 1824, and arrived in Texas with Jared E. Groce^qv in December. In 1825 Keep came from Louisiana aboard the Lady of the Lake in charge of goods for Groce. The goods were damaged on the voyage and were sold at auction; trouble over the goods probably caused the lawsuit that Keep won in May 1826 and the countersuit filed by Groce in 1827. The census of 1826 listed Keep as a farmer and stock raiser aged between twenty-five and forty, a widower with a small son. He took bankruptcy in March 1826 and by August 1826 planned to leave Texas and return to Louisiana.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eugene C. Barker, ed., The Austin Papers (3 vols., Washington: GPO, 1924-28). Lester G. Bugbee, "The Old Three Hundred: A List of Settlers in Austin's First Colony," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 1 (October 1897). Pat Ireland Nixon, The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1853 (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Lupe Memorial Fund, 1946).