Raymore: Named for Two Railroad Men, Burned by One General
Near Kansas City, Missouri
Raymore, Missouri gets its name from a portmanteau. The surnames of two railroad builders, George Rea and Henry Moore, were fused into a single word when the Kansas City, Clinton and Springfield Railroad came through in eighteen eighty-five. The town was actually platted in eighteen seventy-two, more than a decade before the railroad arrived, on a stretch of treeless Cass County prairie that settlers had largely bypassed because there was no timber and no large creek.
Before the Civil War, only three families lived in the whole township. What ended that isolation was also what nearly ended Raymore entirely. General Thomas Ewing's Order Number Eleven, issued in August of eighteen sixty-three, forced the evacuation of civilians across four Missouri border counties and left much of the region, including early Raymore, in smoldering ruins.
The town was rebuilt on the same open grassland and has grown steadily since, today part of the Kansas City metropolitan area with a population above twenty-two thousand.
