Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

The legislature, by act organizing Ray as a separate county, made Bluffton, on the Missouri River, its temporary seat of justice. There all county business was to be transacted until a permanent location of the county seat should be duly approved by the judge of the circuit court. Bluffton continued to be the "seat of justice" of a new, large and prosperous county for nearly seven years. The first judicial tribunal that ever sat in Ray County was held in April, 1821, in the town of Bluffton. Hon. Hamilton Rowan Gamble was the first circuit attorney in the first judicial circuit of Missouri of which Ray County formed a part.

In 1816 families from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee settled at Bluffton on the Missouri River near the present site of Camden. In 1819 Meadders Vanderpool who was later county surveyor, taught the first school in the county and the first steamboat ascended the Missouri River passing Old Bluffton, then county seat of Ray County in the month of September. In 1817 the settlers anticipating an attack from the Osage Indians built on Missouri River, southwest of where Camden now stands, a fort, North Bluffton, the first village founded in Missouri Territory west of Grand and north of Missouri River.

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