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is a city in and the county seat of Jackson County, West Virginia, United States. Ripley was chartered as the county seat in 1832, and is said to have been named for Harry Ripley, a traveling Methodist preacher who drowned in Mill Creek in 1830. The last public hanging in West Virginia took place in Ripley in 1897, when John Morgan was hanged for murder; the spectacle prompted the West Virginia Legislature to ban public executions soon after.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 3.1 square miles (8.0 km²), all of it land.