Doniphan

The Irish Wilderness priest went on to lead two new dioceses. John Joseph Hogan, born in County Limerick in 1829 and ordained in 1852, backed the Union and kept a school at Chillicothe from 1861. In 1865 he refused the loyalty oath Missouri demanded of clergy and was indicted that December; the case was dismissed in 1867 after the Supreme Court ruled in Cummings v. Missouri. He became the first bishop of St. Joseph in 1868 and the first bishop of Kansas City in 1880, published On the Mission in Missouri in 1892, and died in 1913.

What the plaque says

Doniphan On the hills above lovely Current River, Doniphan was founded, 1847, and became the seat of Ripley County in 1860. George Lee gave 50 acres for the town and named it for Mexican War Col. Alexander W. Doniphan. The county, organized in 1833, is named for War of 1812 Gen. E. W. Ripley. Van Buren, the first county seat, was in the area detached from Ripley to form Carter County in 1859. The Irish Wilderness, land of legend and romance, lies in northwestern Ripley and in adjoining counties north and west. There in 1858, Father John Hogan, attracted by cheap government land, founded a Catholic colony. By 1859, forty families, many of them Irish, had settled in the area and a colony chapel was built near Pine in Ripley County. The colony disappeared during the Civil War. In the war, brutal guerrilla bands overran the county and in Sept., 1864, Doniphan was burned by Union troops as Confederate Gen. Sterling Price's army was moving into Ripley County from Arkansas. Devastated by the war, Doniphan grew with the coming of a branch of the Missouri Pacific R. R. in 1883 and development of a lumber industry. (See other side) Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957 Doniphan (Continued from other side) Here in the eastern border of Missouri's Ozarks, Doniphan is the seat of a lumbering and general farming county. Attracted by plentiful game, fine waterways, and fertile bottom land, Southern pioneers settled the area in the early 1800's. Lemuel Kittrell was Doniphan's first permanent settler, 1819. During the early 1900's, Doniphan was the center of a leading railroad tie producing area in the U. S. At the peak, the Missouri Tie and Lumber Co. cut some 35,000,000 feet of logs a year in northwest Ripley County. After 1905, the denuded land was uncared for until made a part of the Clark National Forest in the 1930's when it was put under a program of reforestation. Mounds built by prehistoric Indians have been found in the county, an area utilized in modern times by Osage and by migrating bands of Cherokee and other tribes whose village-camps were built along the Current. The Osage ceded claims to the region, 1808. The Natchitoches Path, noted Indian trail to the Southwest, ran through southeast Ripley county crossing Current River at Pitman's Ferry, Ark., some 12 miles south of Doniphan. Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Big Spring (Ozark National Scenic Riverways) — 25 mi
  A spring at the foot of a dolomite bluff south of Van Buren averaging about 289 million gallons a day into the Current River, dissolving out a cave as it flows, beside a CCC lodge.

More markers nearby

• Poplar Bluff — 26 mi