Ripley, West Virginia

Ripley is the county seat of Jackson County, and it got its name from a tragedy. A young minister named Harry Ripley drowned in Big Mill Creek shortly before his wedding. A settler named Jacob Starcher had already built a grist mill here and was laying out a town when Jackson County was carved from surrounding counties in eighteen thirty-one.

The new county needed a seat, and a rivalry broke out between Ripley's location and the Ohio River settlement at Ravenswood. Virginia's General Assembly appointed an independent commission to settle it, and the inland site won. In eighteen thirty-two the town received its charter, named Ripley in honor of the minister the creek had swallowed.

The Starchers donated eight acres for the courthouse, a jail, a school, and a cemetery, and a county was born.