William Dudley Chipley

William Dudley Chipley (June 6, 1840 – December 1, 1897) was an American railroad executive and politician who was instrumental in the building of the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad and was a tireless promoter of Pensacola, his adopted city, where he was elected to one term as mayor, and later to a term as Florida state senator.

Following the American Civil War, in 1868 Chipley was one of many men arrested in his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, on suspicion of participation in the murder of Radical Republican judge George W. Ashburn by the local Ku Klux Klan.

In 1877, Chipley helped Texas Rangers and Florida law officers subdue and arrest outlaw John Wesley Hardin aboard a train in Pensacola.

Dr. Chipley was renowned for his work relating to brain diseases and held two jobs: a professor of medicine at Transylvania University and the warden of the Eastern Asylum for the Insane in Lexington.

When his employer, Thomas H. Hunt, raised a regiment to fight with the Confederacy, Chipley joined him, later becoming his Adjutant.

He participated with his unit initially as Sergeant Major (Oct 1861) and then appointed 1st Lieutenant and Adjutant on March 1, 1863.

He fought in several engagements with the Army of Tennessee, even after his mentor, Col. Hunt resigned in April 1863 to establish a business in Augusta to support his family.

[10] The prosecution, aided by federal investigator Hiram C. Whitley, assembled evidence of guilt to the point that sympathetic Southern newspapers switched from outright denial of Klan guilt to diminishing the status of the crime; as the Macon Weekly Telegraph hypothesized, perhaps the defendants had intended only to tar and feather Ashburn but when he resisted, the Klan members shot him in "quasi self-defense.

[19] Chipley created the Democratic Executive Committee in Muscogee County, Georgia in the late 1860s, and was its first director.

He was buried in Columbus, while the townspeople of Pensacola erected an obelisk in the Plaza Ferdinand VII in his honor.