Lee's Summit is a city in Jackson and Cass counties in Missouri, United States. It is a suburb of the Kansas City metropolitan area. As of the 2020 census, the population was 101,108, making it the sixth most populous city in both Missouri and the Kansas City metropolitan area.
In 1865, the town was incorporated as Strother, remaining so until it was renamed Lee’s Summit three years later. The city was likely named in honor of Pleasant John Graves Lea, a prominent local citizen killed during the Civil War.
Lee's Summit began as an agricultural community and persisted as such until the mid-twentieth century. Upon the conclusion of World War II, the city began to rapidly suburbanize and grow in population, transitioning into a commuter suburb of Kansas City. During this period of growth, Lee’s Summit developed a well-funded public school district. The school district has consistently ranked among the city’s top employers, alongside federal government offices, healthcare facilities, and retail centers. The city has a historic downtown with an Amtrak station, several human-made lake reservoirs, and numerous parks.
History
Early history
The region encompassing present-day Lee’s Summit has been inhabited by humans for at least 10,000 years. Archaeological evidence suggests continuous human occupation within the present-day boundaries of Lee’s Summit dating back roughly 9,000 years. For example, archaeologists have discovered stone arrowheads characteristic of the Dalton tradition in Lee's Summit, indicating that humans occupied the area at least 9,000 years ago. At another site in the city, arrowheads and ceramics characteristic of the Kansas City Hopewell culture were discovered, indicating that humans had temporary campsites in the area roughly 2,000 years ago. Stone tools and organic remains suggest that temporary campsites in what is now Lee's Summit were used to hunt for deer, bison, and other small mammals, roughly 700 years ago.
At the time of first contact between indigenous Missourians and Europeans in the 1670s, present-day Lee’s Summit fell within the northwestern portion of the territory occupied by the Little Osage people. Other nearby groups included the Missourias to the north and the Kanzas to the west. The area was likely used as hunting grounds by the Osage.
In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed the Mississippi River basin for France as the territory of Louisiana, which included present-day Lee's Summit. In 1762, France secretly ceded the territory to Spain by the Treaty of Fontainebleau.
19th century
In 1803, the United States acquired the territory that includes the area of present-day Lee's Summit through France in the Louisiana Purchase.
The Osage, weakened by encroaching indigenous groups and American settlers from the east, and under pressure from the United States, ceded the last of their territory in Missouri by treaty in 1825. This included present-day Lee's Summit.
In 1827, when commissioners were deciding where to establish the seat of Jackson County, they described southern Jackson County as "useless" prairie. At that time, southern Jackson County, including present-day Lee’s Summit, was the rural counterpart to the increasingly urban north county. Beginning in the 1830s, Americans from eastern slave states came to settle what is now Lee's Summit, attracted by "its rolling prairie, fertile soil, numerous streams, and stands of timber." In 1844, William Bullitt Howard, the eventual founder of Lee's Summit, arrived from Kentucky with his family and slaves. By 1853, settlers had purchased all of the land that now constitutes Lee's Summit from the federal government. In 1860, Prairie Township was incorporated in Jackson County, and the community which would later become Lee's Summit was the largest in the new township.
Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, thereby starting the Missouri-Kansas Border War. Many of the residents of Prairie Township held pro-slavery attitudes, and some even fought in pro-slavery bands of guerrillas. Howard, the eventual founder of Lee's Summit, was arrested by a Union officer and then spent one month in jail in 1859. In July 1862, Irvin Walley, a captain in the Union army, shot and killed Henry Washington Younger, an early settler of Lee's Summit. Less than two months later, anti-slavery guerrillas from Kansas killed Dr. Lea in his home. After these men's deaths, their sons joined up with William Quantrill's pro-Confederate gang and participated in the Lawrence Massacre. Most notable among them was Cole Younger, a life-long resident of Lee's Summit and outlaw who would become "Jesse James's right hand." In response to the Lawrence Massacre, Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr. issued General Order No. 11 in 1863, forcing all residents outside Union-occupied towns in Jackson County to prove allegiance to the Union within fifteen days or else evacuate. This led to the desertion of present-day Lee’s Summit, as many residents fled back to their homes in the east. Union troops then burned and razed many of the abandoned farms.
Incorporation
thumb|right|250px|A map plat of Lee's Summit c. 1877, showing the [[Missouri Pacific Railroad depot and William Bullitt Howard's land]]
Upon the end of the American Civil War in 1865, William Bullitt Howard returned to his home in Jackson County. He reached a deal with the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company to plat a town of along the path of the tracks south of Kansas City and on the way to St. Louis. Lots in the center of the town would be reserved for a train depot. The town was founded as “Strother” in October 1865, named after the family name of Howard’s wife.
In 1868, the town was officially renamed "Lee's Summit." A flier from 1865 refers to the town as "Strother, formerly known as Lee's Summit," indicating that the town was colloquially known as Lee's Summit prior to its founding by Howard. It is very likely that Lee's Summit was named in honor of Pleasant John Graves Lea, who was killed nearby in 1862. Workers for the Missouri Pacific Railroad may have painted "Lees Summit" on the side of a boxcar to serve as a temporary depot in the city.
The spelling “Lee” instead of "Lea" is assumed to be an error, while “Summit” refers to the city’s location at the highest point along the railroad between Kansas City and St. Louis.thumb|[[Saint Paul's Episcopal Church (Lee's Summit, Missouri)|Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, built in 1884]]In 1877, Lee's Summit was incorporated as a fourth-class city and by then was the "commercial center for the surrounding agricultural community." The primary occupation in Lee's Summit was farming—particularly hogs, corn, and fruit orchards. In 1885, a fire destroyed much of downtown Lee's Summit.
thumb|280x280px|Longview Mansion, built in 1914 as part of [[Longview Farm]]
In 1912, lumber baron and Kansas City civic leader Robert A. Long began building his 1,780 acre (7.2 km<sup>2</sup>) estate, Longview Farm, much of which lay in southwestern Lee's Summit. It took eighteen months to complete with the work of over two thousand laborers. At the time of building, it was considered the largest construction project in the country. At the time of completion, the farm employed over two hundred people who lived on the property. Long's daughter, Loula Long Combs, made a lifelong career of raising champion show horses on the farm. In 2004, part of the farm was developed into the New Longview neighborhood.
In March 1922, at the Veterans Memorial Hall in downtown Lee's Summit (now the Third Street Social restaurant), Harry S. Truman announced he was running for election as County Court judge of the eastern district of Jackson County—the first political candidacy of his career. Years later, in 1956, Truman said of his first political speech that it "was a flop for me." "I was more scared then than I was at any time later, even when I was on the front in the first world war in France.” During the primary campaign, Truman briefly pursued Ku Klux Klan membership, believing it would help him secure more votes, in part because of prominent cross burnings in Lee's Summit. Two years later, during his reelection campaign, he faced public opposition from Jackson County treasurer and Lee's Summit mayor, Todd George, who may have been affiliated with the Klan. Truman claimed that the Klan threatened to kill him, and in response he disrupted a Klan rally in Lee's Summit, shaming the roughly one thousand attendees for their anti-Catholic and antisemitic views. In 1928, Truman, as the presiding judge of the County Court, undertook the construction of many roads connecting Lee's Summit to the rest of the metro area, as well as a hospital just outside the city (later named Truman Medical Center-East, now University Health Lakewood Medical Center).
At the end of World War II in 1945, there was enormous demand for single-family housing across the United States. This demand, combined with the recently built roads, Federal Housing Administration policy, and the G.I. Bill, spurred the rapid suburbanization of Lee's Summit. Developers began building entire neighborhoods in the city but were interrupted from 1950 to 1953 by the Korean War. After the war, however, the number of people living in and around Lee's Summit grew significantly. According to the 1950 census, about 2,500 people lived in Lee's Summit; by 1960, the population had grown to over 8,000. This population growth resulted from white Kansas City residents relocating to the suburbs and from large annexations by the city. By the late 1950s, Lee's Summit was no longer an agricultural community, but instead a commuter suburb—nearly sixty percent of residents worked outside the city, and farming had all but disappeared.
thumb|Sculpture with Green Street event space in the background
In 1961, Western Electric opened a factory in Lee’s Summit, and within a year it employed about three thousand people. The Western Electric plant, which was in operation until 2002, contributed to the city's growth by providing a tax base for further annexations and a well-funded public school district. Rapid growth persisted through the 1970s and 1980s, with the city’s population exceeding 46,000 by 1990. John Knox Village, a long-term care facility completed in 1970, has remained one of the city's top employers. The damming of the Little Blue River in 1985 created Longview Lake, home to amenities including the Fred Arbanas Golf Course and MCC-Longview Community College.
Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton classified the Kansas City metro area as “hypersegregated” between white and Black residents as recently as the 1980s. Lee's Summit, as a second-ring white-flight suburb, According to sociologist Kevin Fox Gotham, residents of Lee's Summit successfully resisted efforts to locate federally subsidized housing in the suburb—meant to integrate the metro area—in the 1970s and into the 1990s. In 1978, officials and students from the Kansas City public school district filed a federal lawsuit against the Lee’s Summit school district and several other suburban districts, alleging racial discrimination. The District Court dismissed the case against the school district, finding insufficient evidence that officials had intentionally preserved school segregation. Although the Lee's Summit school district was removed from the case, the District Court went on to order extensive improvements to Kansas City schools, pay raises for employees, and the creation of a magnet school system aimed at addressing the metro-area school segregation by attracting suburban students to inner city schools. In the 1995 case Missouri v. Jenkins, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Missouri government was no longer required to fund the magnet school program, effectively ending the improvements and pay raises.
Geography
Lee's Summit is located near Missouri's western border with Kansas and is in the northern half of the state. The city borders Kansas City to the west and northwest, Independence to the north, unincorporated Jackson County to the east, Greenwood to the southeast, and Lake Winnebago as well as unincorporated Cass County to the south. It is a suburb in the Kansas City, MO-KS Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Lee's Summit is part of the Wooded Osage Plains ecoregion, a "non-glaciated undulating plain with smooth, low, limestone escarpments and small areas of exposed bedrock." Characteristic geology includes limestone, sandstone, and shale strata, which produce a "rolling topography." The natural vegetation is "a mosaic of oak-hickory woodland and bluestem prairie."
Lee's Summit resides partially within, and to the south and east of, the Little Blue River valley. Bethany Falls, a 20-foot-thick limestone formation, runs underneath Lee's Summit, resulting in bluffs near Longview Lake.
Downtown Lee's Summit, a roughly ten-block by ten-block area, lies at the center of the city. Businesses occupy the core of downtown and are surrounded predominantly by single family housing. Stretching to the eastern and western boundaries of the city are neighborhoods composed almost exclusively of single family housing. Lining the edges of Interstate 470, U.S. Route 50, and Missouri Route 291 are commercial, industrial, and mixed use areas. North of downtown, where Route 291 meets Interstate 470, lies the Lee's Summit Municipal Airport. The land immediately to the north of this middle stretch of the city is agricultural, as is the land immediately to the south. Neighborhoods of single family housing occupy the northernmost and southernmost portions of the city.
Climate
Lee's Summit experiences a four-season humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfa) with cold days and nights during the winter, and hot days and muggy nights during the summer. No physical features obstruct the flow of air, allowing moist currents from the Gulf of Mexico, dry currents from the semiarid southwest, and cold polar continental currents to interact and affect the weather in the area. This causes the weather to be highly variable, sometimes producing tornadoes and storms. Spring is the season when variation is the highest. Spring is also characterized by high precipitation and moderate temperatures. Summer has warm to hot temperatures and is humid. Precipitation is also high during the summer. Fall has mild days and cool nights, with low precipitation. Winters are dry and moderately cold.