Rufus Putnam Ranney was the third of the eight children of Rufus and Dolly (Blair) Ranney, both natives of Blandford, Massachussets, where he was born on October 30, 1813. He was descended from Thomas Ranney (Rany or Ranny) who became a landowner in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1658. In 1824 the family made the pilgrimage to northeastern Ohio and settled at Freedom.
The annals of pioneers are usually meager, and this is particularly true of the Ranney family for the next decade, but in that time the younger Rufus acquired some schooling, taught school, and enjoyed the luxury for a western farm boy of a brief residence at a near-by academy. In 1833 he entered Western Reserve College at Hudson, but his resources held out for one year only.
Denied a college training, he studied law in the office of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade at Jefferson, Ohio, and in 1836 he was admitted to the bar.
His rise in the legal profession was rapid. When Giddings entered Congress in 1838 Ranney was taken into partnership with Wade.
In 1845, when Wade became a judge of the court of common pleas, the firm dissolved and Ranney moved to Warren, Ohio. He was a candidate for Congress in 1846 and again in 1848, but the Democratic party was usually a hopeless minority in the Western Reserve counties. Two years later (1850) he was chosen to represent Trumbull County in the second Ohio constitutional convention, where he took a leading part. He shared the Jeffersonian faith in democracy, the Jacksonian confidence in direct popular rule; his chief concern in the framing of the constitution was to increase the share of the masses in government. He submitted a minority report in the committee on judiciary, of which he was a member, which provided for a supreme court with judges chosen by the people and holding sessions in circuits from county to county, in order to keep the court close to the people.
Ranney's record in the convention won him prompt recognition, for in March 1851 the legislature chose him for a short-term vacancy in the state supreme court, and in October at the first election under the new constitution he was continued in office by popular vote.
Five years later on the expiration of his term he retired from public life in order to resume the practice of law, this time in Cleveland. In 1859 he was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio. In 1862 he was again elected to the state supreme court, but he resigned at the end of two years.
After the Civil War he devoted himself to his law practice in Cleveland. On the establishment in 1881 of the Ohio State Bar Association he became the first president.
He favored extreme separation of powers of legislature, executive, and judiciary, to the extent of opposing the governor's veto in legislation, and short terms and popular election for all public officials.
While living in Jefferson, Ranney was married on May 1, 1839, to Adaline Warner, the daughter of Jonathan Warner, a lawyer and associate judge of the court of common pleas. They had six children, three of whom died young.
