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Chapman (1880), pp. 679, 681; Howard (1907) I, p. 284; 1875 atlas footnote
John and Peter Cripe came in 1830 and settled Section 26, two sections east of the townsite. Peter's biography in Chapman is the fuller record: born in Ohio in 1824, son of John and Eva (Roof) Cripe, natives of Pennsylvania; "brought by his parents to this county in the fall of 1830, and they first located in German tp., where they died and are buried"; he came into Clay Township in 1852 and in 1855 married Philistia A. Skiles (born in Indiana, 1836); nine children, all living in 1880 — among them Jane, "the wife of Aaron Ulery, a farmer of Clay tp.," and Fannie, "the wife of John Wrightsman." He held 137 acres on Section 26 and was of the German Baptist faith. The family's second thread is the township's church: Jacob Cripe was, with Christian Wenger, a first pastor of the German Baptist church built on Section 24 in 1868, and the pulpit Peter's son-in-law John B. Wrightsman — born in Pulaski County, Virginia, in 1853, come to the county in 1875, married to Fannie Cripe in 1879 — held by 1880, a minister and teacher on Section 26. The surname survives in the town's own street plan: the town's park pavilion stands on West Cripe Street (the town code's parks chapter gives the address), a street carrying a first-settler family's name a mile from the family's section — the naming act itself is not in the record reached, and the survival is printed as exactly that.