First County Seat of Ray County, MO - First of its Kind on Waymarking.com

Marker Erected by: Ray County Historical Society
Date Marker Erected: 1970
Marker Location: MO-T, ½ mile W. of Camden.
County of Marker: Ray

Marker Text:
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 [river] and north of Missouri River.

"Following six years of controversy [beginning in 1821], commissioners chose the site of Richmond in 1827 as the permanent location for the county seat of Ray county. It was a primitive site at the time and required more development before it could adequately function. Until that time, Bluffton, the first and temporary location, continued to serve as the county seat."
~ University of Missouri Extension

"Local tradition has it that the first settlers in Bluffton were the members of a Copeland family, at or near Bluffton, who went to Oregon during the land rush thee in 1850's. When Bluffton was started there were no steamboats on the Missouri River, and the river traffic was not considered to be any particular importance. So the fort was built, and the town of Bluffton was started off the river, to the west of what is now Camden, in Sections 26 and 27, Township 51, Range 28. Bluffton's demise began with the regular advent of the steamboat on the Missouri River finished the town, which was already dwindling with the transfer of the county seat to Richmond. Camden, a good steamboat landing site, was platted in 1836, and Bluffton was replaced and gone. " - MoGenWeb

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