Judge Robert Montgomery Rippey was an early Greene County settler and the namesake of the town of Rippey. In 1854, the year Greene County was formally organized, he surveyed the entire county. In the winter of 1856, he and two partners drove mule and oxen teams to Burlington through deep snow and bitter cold to obtain equipment for a steam-powered sawmill, and they opened this mill near Rippey on July 4, 1857. Judge Rippey was killed in action with the 39th Iowa Infantry in the Civil War.