A Brief History of Johnson County

All of the 476 square miles that are now Johnson County were once part of the Shawnee Indian reservation. The territory was opened to settlement with the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. At that time the area was crisscrossed by a number of major westward migration routes including the Santa Fe and Oregon-California Trails.

Johnson County was created in 1855 and officially organized as a county on September 7, 1857. One of the first 33 counties in the state, it was named for the Reverend Thomas Johnson, founder of the Shawnee Methodist Mission.

By the time Johnson County was organized, a number of communities already were established within its boundaries. The first was Olathe Town Company which was incorporated on February 20, 1857. Soon thereafter the towns of Spring Hill, Gardner, De Soto, and Gum Springs (present-day Shawnee) also were incorporated.

In 1870 there were 13,000 people residing in the county. The population remained relatively stable and the economy agriculturally based until the 1910s when the northeastern section of the county began to be developed. Lured by innovative community developments designed by J.C. Nichols – Mission Hills in the early 1910s and the Country Club District in the early 1920s – more and more families began to emigrate from established Kansas City neighborhoods into rural areas south and west of Kansas City.

In 1904, W.B. Strang began construction of an interurban electric railroad between Kansas City and Olathe. It passed through his newly platted community of Overland Park and the established town of Lenexa. A second interurban railroad, the Hocker Grove Line, was constructed south and west through Merriam and Shawnee. Both the Hocker Grove and Strang Companies also acted as real estate developers, platting new subdivisions along their lines.

Between 1910 and 1940, the population of the county grew from 18,288 to 33,327. Most of this growth was confined to the extreme northeast corner and the corridors created by highways and the electric railroads. The rural, agricultural communities in the western and southern parts of the county remained largely as they had throughout the 19th century.

In the decades following World War II, the county’s population exploded. By 1950, the number of county residents increased to 63,000. The decade of the 1960s saw the county’s population double again to 120,000. The most significant growth continued to be in communities located in the northeast section of the county – Prairie Village, Overland Park, Shawnee, Merriam, Roeland Park, Mission, and Leawood.

Over the last half of the century, population and building growth was stimulated by modern transportation corridors such as Interstates 35 and 435 that opened formerly rural areas to new types of development. In the process, a significant shift in employment patterns began to emerge in the county. From 1970 to 1984 the number of people employed by businesses within the county increased by more than 200%. Once a bedroom community for Kansas City, Missouri, Johnson County now employs more than half its working residents.

By 2000 the county’s population reached 443,000, and projections indicate it will exceed 630,000 by 2020. Current growth and development patterns are to the south, southwest and west of the heavily developed northeast section.