The town's name comes from the Gumbaynggirr language, from a word rendered as Dundurriga, meaning stringybark, the tree that grows across the plateau. The Gumbaynggirr people lived on and moved through this high country long before any timber cutter arrived, and the plateau remains their country. The European story here is recent by comparison and begins, as so much of the local landscape does, with a tree, the prized Australian red cedar that drew the first outsiders up from the valleys below.

By 1841 timber cutters had pushed into the Bellinger River searching for red cedar, the soft, richly coloured timber that Australians called red gold. They worked one stand of giant trees and moved to the next, following old Aboriginal routes up onto the plateau. When the best of the cedar was gone, the cleared land was turned to dairying, and for generations cream and butter were the lifeblood of the plateau. A railway once climbed the steep range from Glenreagh to carry it all down to the coast, until flood damage closed the line for good in October 1972. Timber and dairy still shape the town today, even as tourism grows.

For more than a century, Dorrigo kept a small piece of newspaper history alive. The Don Dorrigo Gazette, first published in 1910, was believed to be the last newspaper in Australia still printed using hot-metal typesetting, with lines of type cast in molten metal and locked into a press, a craft that vanished almost everywhere else decades ago. The Gazette held on until July 2023, when rising costs and competition from social media finally closed it. With its final edition, one of the last working letterpress newspapers in the country fell silent.

Set high on a plateau in the path of moisture rolling off the Pacific, Dorrigo has seen some of the most extreme weather in the state. On 24 June 1950, 636 millimetres of rain fell in a single 24 hours, a state record for daily rainfall. In February 1954, a tropical cyclone that had crossed the coast near Tweed Heads dumped an astonishing 809.2 millimetres on a Dorrigo weather station in 24 hours — the highest daily rainfall total ever recorded anywhere in New South Wales. The town has known hail banked up in the streets and even snow on the plateau. To live in Dorrigo is to live with weather that arrives, sometimes, by the half-metre.

Most travellers come to Dorrigo for what lies just east of it. Five kilometres down Dome Road, the plateau breaks away at Dorrigo National Park, a World Heritage remnant of Gondwana rainforest where a Skywalk reaches out over the escarpment and waterfalls pour off the tableland edge. The town is the natural base for it, the place to fuel up, warm up and dry out before walking among six-hundred-year-old trees. Around 1,000 people call Dorrigo home, custodians, in a way, of the road that delivers everyone else to the forest.