Richmond was founded in 1827 as the seat of Ray County on land donated by John Wollard, W.B. Martin, and Isaac and William Thornton. Ray County, organized in 1820, first had its seat at Bluffton, where Camden, an early Missouri River port, was laid out in 1836, but the river channel suddenly shifted there on July 3, 1915, leaving Camden several miles inland and placing the Lafayette County boundary north of the river in that area. Settled by Southerners who came in 1814-15 and named for Missouri legislator John Ray, the county includes early settlements at Bluffton near present Camden and Buffalo near where Hardin was later founded in 1868. Richmond and Ray County endured troop movements, skirmishes, and guerrilla raids during 1861-65, while the postwar years brought coal mining, railroad growth, and development as a trade and legal center for a livestock, grain, and coal mining county in Missouri's Glacial Plains Region, in territory ceded by the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes in 1824. The St. Louis & St. Joseph (Santa Fe) reached Richmond in 1870, the North Mo. (Wabash) reached nearby Henrietta in 1869, and Chicago, Santa Fe, & Calif. (Santa Fe) arrived in 1887. Early schools included Richmond Academy, opened in 1836, and Woodson (Methodist) Institute, founded in 1893. Near Orrick, laid out in 1869, river bottom land became one of the state's leading potato producing areas. Richmond is associated with Alexander W. Doniphan, who lived there 19 years and is honored at the courthouse by a state statue by F.C. Hibbard; as a colonel in the Mexican War, he led the 1st Reg. Mo. Mounted Volunteers on the 1846-47 self-sustaining expedition to Mexico. Other figures connected with the area include governors Forest Smith, born near Richmond, and Austin A. King, who lived there, and Albert M. Clark, born in nearby Lawson. Richmond's cemeteries contain the State Monument to Gov. King, a Latter-Day Saints monument to David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and the unmarked grave of guerrilla raider Bill Anderson, while the town also has the gravesite of Mexican War Captain Israel R. Hendley.