Capt. David P. Mapes

Founder

Capt. David Parshall Mapes was the driving force behind developing the new “embryo city” of Ripon as well as the school that would become Ripon College.

He was born Jan. 10, 1798, in Coxsackie, Greene County, New York. He worked in various positions in the East, including one term in the New York legislature, operating a lumber mill in New York City in the 1830s and a steamboat on the Hudson River.

He moved to the Wisconsin Territory in 1844. He declared of the Ripon area: “a more beautiful place I have never found in nature” and with a “silver creek weaving its way through Wisconsin’s rolling hills.”

He worked to build a flour mill and public house, obtained railroad trackage south to Milwaukee and north to the Wolf River, and persuaded the federal government to move the post office from Ceresco to Ripon.

“In the meantime,” it states in “Ripon College A History,” “he became the dominant force in propagating the idea of a college: he was the first president of the Lyceum and, later, of the College’s Board of Trustees; if Ripon College had a single founder, it was David Mapes. Yet, for Mapes, the promise of a college was mainly one way of promoting a town. … ‘Our object,’ he wrote, ‘was to draw around us a class of inhabitants who would have the pride to educate their children.’’’

Mapes gave away lots of land if the recipients agreed to make certain improvements or establish specified buildings. The first lot went to E.L. Northrup, who built Ripon’s first store.

For the college, Mapes donated an acre of land on the highest point in the village so that “the vision of the traveler, as he approaches Ripon from any direction, will have a full view of Brockway College, …” Mapes wrote in his autobiographical and historical account about Ripon, “History of the City of Ripon,” published in 1873 when he was 75 years old.

He began to raise funds by any means possible, wholly furnished by the people of Ripon with monetary and labor contributions. The school was chartered Jan. 29, 1851, when Mapes and Alvan E. Bovay staked out the first building of the College in a snowstorm.

Mapes was a member of the first state Democratic caucus to nominate presidential electors and state candidates, and was a presidential elector in 1852. In the late 1860s, he moved to Winneconne, Wisconsin, which he helped develop, and operated a hotel there until his death.

He died May 17, 1890, at the age of 92.