Mission, Kansas

Mission is a Johnson County city whose name reaches back to the Shawnee Methodist Mission, which the Reverend Thomas Johnson established in this area in the eighteen thirties to serve the Shawnee people. The federal government had assigned all of present-day Johnson County to the Shawnee tribe in eighteen twenty-five. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of eighteen fifty-four opened the land to white settlement, the Shawnee reservation was dissolved and towns began to grow.

The suburb itself started in nineteen twenty-six, when the Breyfogel family subdivided a tract into two hundred forty-five lots and called it Mission Hill Acres. Postal authorities shortened the name to Mission in nineteen thirty-eight. The city incorporated in nineteen fifty-one and today sits densely inside the Kansas City metro, a small city of ten thousand with a very old name.