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is a village in Brown County, Ohio, United States, along the Ohio River 50 miles southeast of Cincinnati. The population was 1,745 at the 2000 census.
Colonel James Poage, a veteran of the American Revolution, arrived in the free state of Ohio from Staunton, Virginia in 1804 to claim the 1000 acres (4 km²) he had been granted in what was then the Virginia Military District. Poage was among a large group of veterans who received land grants beyond the Ohio for their service and freed their slaves when they settled there. Poage and his family laid out the town of Staunton in 1812; it was renamed in 1816 to honor an American officer in the War of 1812, General Eleazar Wheelock Ripley.
The proximity of the river and of the slave state of Kentucky on the opposite shore led to Ripley's role as an early stop on the Underground railroad, a network of citizens sympathetic to slaves escaping north to freedom. A number of prominent abolitionists lived in the town in the 1800s, mainly on Front Street near the river, including John Rankin, former slave John Parker, Thomas McCague, Thomas Collins and Dr. Alexander Campbell.
Rankin moved from Kentucky to Ripley in 1822 and later built a house (now a National Historic Landmark) on Liberty Hill overlooking the town, the river and the Kentucky shore. There he was able to signal escaping slaves with a lantern on a flagpole
and provide them shelter. A slave woman that crossed the frozen river to Ripley and stayed in his house in 1838 became the model for the character Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark book, ''Uncle Tom's Cabin