Lebo: A Pioneer's Name on a Railroad Town

Lebo is commonly said to take its name from Captain Joe Lebo, a pioneer settler, though the origin of the name is not certain. When the railroad pushed through in eighteen eighty-three, David L. Jones purchased land near a planned depot and, with William Barr, began laying out the town that spring.

The economy rested on three legs: farming, and the coal seams that run through Coffey County, and the railroad that moved both. Lebo never became large, but it became a durable small city in the Neosho River country, the kind of place that coal and wheat sustained through the late eighteen hundreds and that kept its post office and school well into the twentieth century.