Bonner Springs: Named for a New York Editor

You are passing through Bonner Springs, Kansas, a small city on the north bank of the Kansas River about seventeen miles west of Kansas City. The site has been occupied far longer than the town's name suggests. In eighteen twelve, French fur traders August and Pierre Chouteau established a trading post here called Four Houses, considered among the earliest permanent commercial settlements in what would become Kansas.

The modern town grew from a different enterprise entirely. In eighteen eighty-five, a developer named Philo Clark organized the Bonner Springs Town Company and named the settlement in honor of Robert Bonner, publisher of the New York Ledger. Clark became the first mayor when the city incorporated in eighteen ninety-eight. The mineral springs in the area gave the place its other half of the name. Today Bonner Springs is a city of about eight thousand people in the Kansas City metro area, just west of the Legends shopping district and the Kansas Speedway.