The Power of Persistence

Some people are never satisfied unless they’re starting something new. Some people refuse to give up no matter how many times they seem to be down for the count. Some people just don’t take no for an answer. Such a man was Captain David P. Mapes, principal founder of the city in which I live – Ripon, Wisconsin.

After founding the city of Carbondale in Pennsylvania, David Mapes moved on to New York City, where he operated a commercial steamboat and took to calling himself Captain. Before long, his steamboat and worldly fortune sank in New York’s East River.

Undaunted, Mapes packed up and headed west. He didn’t stop until he reached the Valley of Ceresco, ninety miles north of Milwaukee, where a band of utopian socialists led by a visionary named Warren Chase had founded a community the called the Wisconsin Phalanx. Mapes struck a deal with the largest landowner in the area, former Acting Governor of the Michigan Territory John Scott Horner, to sell plots of land to settlers in a brand-new city. They named their city Ripon, after the English cathedral town which was Horner’s ancestral home. Mapes’s primary method of attracting settlers was to flag down passing wagons heading westward and talk up the virtues and advantages of living in Ripon. He was a crackerjack promoter who seldom took no for an answer.

For about two years, a rivalry flourished between Chase, the founder of the Ceresco Commune, and Mapes, the founder of Ripon over the future of their adjacent communities. As the commune faltered around 1850, however, the pioneer spirit of competition gave way to the pioneer spirit of cooperation, and Ceresco was eventually absorbed by Ripon. Mapes soon laid plans to attract responsible settlers by building a college on Ripon’s highest hill. Originally named Brockway College after a man who donated the largest founding gift ($250), the school eventually took its name from the city it lived in – Ripon College. Thus within four years of losing everything he owned, Captain David Mapes had founded a city and a college that have lasted for more than 160 years.