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Before Europeans arrived in North America, the Shawnee people resided in the Eastern woodlands of what is now the Untied States. In 1793, some Shawnee tribespeople made a treaty with the Spanish for land in Eastern Missouri. In 1825, this group of Shawnee signed a treaty with the United States Government to exchange their land in Missouri for land in present day Eastern Kansas. The remaining tribe in the East signed the Treaty of Fort Meigs in 1817 that granted three areas of land for reservations in Northwest Ohio. However, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 further displaced this group of Shawnee and sent them to join the reservation in Kansas. In that same year, Shawnee Chief Fish requested a missionary to join them on their new reservation. At the behest of the missionary society, Methodist Reverend Thomas Johnson first went to the present-day Turner area of Kansas City, Kansas, and built a two story building to minister to the Shawnee people. He then requested to move to the mission’s present location in Fairway to build a larger school that would serve more tribes, but who’s primary focus would be converting the Native People to Christianity and forcing them to assimilate to European-American culture by giving them Anglo names, forbidding communication in any language other than English, and stripping them of any traditional clothing and objects. During it’s twenty-plus years of operation, up to 200 children aged 5 to 23 were housed at any given time from the Cherokee, Chippewa, Delaware, Gros Ventres, Kaw, Kickapoo, Munsee, Omaha, Osage, Otoe, Ottawa, Peoria, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wea, and Wyandot tribes.

In October 1839, the mission officially opened. That same year, the West building was completed and housed staff living quarters, a dining hall, and a kitchen. The East building followed in 1841 and contained a chapel, classrooms, and living quarters for both teachers and students. The North building completed the primary structures in 1845 that contained classrooms and a girls’ dormitory. The children were taught basic academic subjects alongside training for homemaking, carpentry, blacksmithing, milling and farming.  The school employed white settlers from the area and sustained itself with over 2,000 acres of farmland and had its own gristmill, sawmill, blacksmith, and barn.

In 1854, the school ceased the manual labor training it began in the 1830s, but still continued as a mission until the early 1860s. In 1855, the mission became the home of the territorial governor, Andrew Reeder, and what has come to be known as the “bogus legislature” that included Thomas Johnson. This fraudulently elected legislature advocated for Kansas to be admitted to the Union as a slave state and criminalized the acts of those seeking to help enslaved people escape to free territory. By 1856, the territorial capital moved to Lecompton and President Pierce fired Governor Reeder and appointed a new pro-Southern governor. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed on May 30, 1854, opened Johnson County to white settlers seeking to own land once promised to the Shawnee, once again displacing the tribe. Their final move to Oklahoma would be their last forced mass removal as the tribe is still headquartered in Miami, Oklahoma.

Although the story of the Shawnee Indian Mission is a tragic one, a love story did survive. On November 12, 1853, a white laborer on the mission, Samuel Garrett, married a Shawnee woman named Elizabeth Choteau. Garrett was officially adopted into the Shawnee tribe in 1856. The Garretts stayed in Johnson County until 1870 when Elizabeth tragically died. Samuel then took their six children to Miami, Oklahoma, to resume life with the Shawnee. In 1911, their son Frederick returned to Johnson County, building a farm near Wilder.

The Shawnee Indian Mission closed in 1862. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 23, 1968, and three brick buildings still stand. The site is open for tours – click here for more information.

-Amanda Wahlmeier, Johnson County Library