Picture Courtesy of Jim Kuntz

On the hills above lovely Current River, Doniphan was founded, 1847, and became the seat of Ripley County in 1860. George Lee gave 50 acres for the town and named it for Mexican War Col. Alexander W. Doniphan. The county, organized in 1833, is named for War of 1812 Gen. E.W. Ripley. Van Buren, the first county seat, was in the area detached from Ripley to form Carter County in 1859.

The Irish wilderness, land of legend and romance, lies in northwestern Ripley and in adjoining counties north and west. There in 1858, Father John Hogan, attracted by cheap government land, founded a Catholic colony. By 1859, forty families, many of them Irish, had settled in the area and the colony chapel was built near Pine in Ripley County. The colony disappeared during the Civil War.

In the war, brutal guerrilla bands overran the county and in Sept., 1864, Doniphan was burned by Union troops as Confederate Gen. Sterling Price's army was moving into Ripley County from Arkansas. Devastated by the war, Doniphan grew with the coming of a branch of the Missouri Pacific R.R. in 1883 and development of a lumber industry.

Here in the eastern border of Missouri's Ozarks, Doniphan is the seat of a lumbering and general farming county. Attracted by plentiful game, fine waterways, and fertile bottom land, Southern pioneers settled the area in the early 1800's. Lemuel Kittrell was Doniphan's first permanent settler, 1819.

During the early 1900's, Doniphan was the center of a leading railroad tie producing area in the U.S. At the peak, the Missouri Tie and Lumber Co. cut some 35,000,000 feet of logs a year in northwest Ripley County. After 1905, the denuded land was uncared for until made a part of Clark National Forest in the 1930's when it was put under a program of reforestation.

Mounds built by prehistoric Indians have been found in the county, an area utilized in modern times by Osage and by migrating bands of Cherokee and other tribes whose village-camps were built along the Current. The Osage ceded claims to the region, 1808. The Natchitoches Path, noted Indian trail to the Southwest, ran through southeastern Ripley County crossing the Current River at Pitman's Ferry, Ark., some 12 miles south of Doniphan.

Comments (2)

Jim Kuntz: ... The St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad built the line to Doniphan in 1883. Missouri pacific bought out the railroad operation in 1919. 1 October 25, 2006 Jim Kuntz: ... Doniphan became county seat 1847. Clark National Forest was combined with the Mark Twain National Forest in 1976. 2 January 03, 2008

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