Warren Chase came to the Ripon area in 1844, when he led a small group of men from Southport (now Kenosha) to a valley which he named Ceresco (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.) There he established the Wisconsin Phalanx, an experiment in communal living based on the teachings of the French social philosopher, Charles Fourier. The community lasted from 1844 to 1850, and was disbanded because of social concerns such as need for private and family space, not for economic reasons. Chase believed in utopian socialism, spiritualism, women's rights, and, most scandalously at the time, free love. However, he was a successful leader and politician. He had been elected as a delegate to both the 1846 and 1847-48 Wisconsin constitutional delegations, served a two-year term in the first state legislature and ran for governor under the Free Soil Party in 1849. He was "briefly" one of the first trustees of the College. His autobiography, The Life Line of the Lone One: or an Autobiography of the World's Child, gives further insights into his beliefs and differences with the beliefs of those around him.

David Mapes, or Captain Mapes, was "undoubtedly," according to Ashley and Miller, the most important contributor to the founding of the College. Mapes was originally from New York, where he had served two terms in the New York State Legislature among other occupations, including operating a steamboat and a line of stage coaches. After his boat and business sank after hitting a reef in the East River, Mapes headed West. In 1845 he found the perfect location to build a town, the only impediments being that the land he needed was owned by Governer Horner and the Ceresco Commune. However, he eventually worked out terms which allowed him to become the founder of the City of Ripon using both parcels of land. Mapes gave the ground for a college, a square acre on the highest point of College Hill, according to Ripon College, A Historical Sketch, by Ex-President Edward H. Merrell, Mapes was a booster, a boomer, who promoted Ripon's growth as a city relentlessly. He saw the addition of a college as a way of attracting desirable newcomers to settle in the town he had founded. Ashley and Miller, p. 5, say that "under his guidance the College never became much more than a promise"used to lure travelers into becoming citizen. The cover of the book, Ripon College: A History, portrays Mapes and the staking of the first building of the new college. Mapes wrote an autobiographical and historical account, History of Ripon, which is available in the Library.

Alvan Earl Bovay was a New Yorker, who had graduated from Norwich University in Vermont and then taken a teaching job in New York City. There he joined the National Reform Party, through which he became a speaker and propagandist in the "rent wars." He and Mapes were in the same area at the same time, but no evidence exists that they knew each other. However, Bovay had read about Warren Chase and the Wisconsin Phalanx in the New York Tribune , according to Ashley and Miller, p.5. Bovay arrived just as the commune was disbanding, but Mapes persuaded Bovay to become a part of the Village of Ripon development. Bovay purchased land and began developing "Bovay's Addition." As the village's first lawyer and a political reformer with strong Whig Party ties in the East, Bovay was naturally a leader in the famous meeting in 1854 in the Little While Schoolhouse, at which the name of Republican Party was given to a new political movement. Bovay's handwritten records of the early days of the College still survive. He was a director, one of the first official trustees, and also a member of the faculty of the College. Ashley and Miller describe his involvement: "he played a relatively brief but dominant role in the making of the college....It is quite possible that he was the driving force behind Mapes" plan for a school. A brief biography of Bovay from the late 1800s is available in the Archives.