Lenexa: Named for a Shawnee Woman

The name Lenexa traces back to a Shawnee woman recorded on census rolls as Na-Nex-Se, wife of Chief Thomas Blackhoof. When the Missouri River, Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad needed a right-of-way across former Shawnee land in eighteen sixty-nine, engineer Charles Bradshaw sold the corridor and donated a strip for a depot. He then sold ten and a half acres to Octave Chanute, a French-born railroad surveyor who would later inspire the Wright brothers, and Chanute platted the town.

Bradshaw declined to have it named after himself, and Lenexa was chosen instead. The town stayed tiny until it incorporated in nineteen oh seven, and for decades it was best known for its spinach farms, once shipping a million pounds a season. Today Lenexa is a Johnson County suburb of nearly sixty thousand people, but the name still carries the memory of a Shawnee woman whose land this once was.