Shawnee Indian Mission
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
Established in 1839 as a manual training school for children of the Shawnee and other area Indian nations who had been promised lands in the future territory of Kansas, this site has served as a historic landmark since 1927, when the state of Kansas acquired the property. The school was organized and led in its early years by Methodist minister Thomas Johnson, the namesake of Johnson County, and operated until 1862. Following the creation of the Kansas Territory in 1854, this facility also served as a meeting place of the territorial legislature in the era known as Bleeding Kansas. Following the 1865 murder of Thomas Johnson, a judge determined that the property should be transferred to the descendants of the Johnson family. The land was held as private property until 1927, when it was converted to a state historic site administered by the Kansas State Historical Society. The twelve-acre site was originally part of a 1,600-acre area and was once a part of the 1.6 million-acre Shawnee reservation. The complex includes historic structures, a walking trail with native plant gardens, and interpretive signage. Today, the site is administered jointly by the City of Fairway, the Kansas State Historical Society, and the Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. Visitors to the National Historic Landmark can view the remains of the mission and learn the stories of those who lived here. In recent years, the site has worked to focus interpretation on the lives of Native American children and their families, as well as the missionaries, teachers, and enslaved laborers who lived here. The site also includes information about the building's use as a meeting place of the territorial legislature within the context of Bleeding Kansas and the start of the Civil War, as well as the experiences of first-generation settler families and the early history of the surrounding city.
Images
The East Building is one of three surviving structures at the mission and serves as the museum's visitor center.

The North Building was constructed in 1845 and houses several museum exhibits.

This rain garden is one of several along the walking path

The West Building

The West Garden and herb garden

This replica of a wagon is located along the walking trails

The complex includes several buildings designed to replicate the outbuildings that were present



The butterfly garden is located next to the rain garden

The east building when facing east from the butterfly garden

Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
Today, three federally recognized tribes of the Shawnee People trace their lineage to the Shawnee who lived in the Ohio River Valley for many generations. By the early 1800s, westward expansion threatened the territory and security of the tribe. By the 1820s, two-thirds of the Shawnee were living in Missouri. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the Shawnee and numerous other Native American tribes to abandon their homes and move to reservations in western territories, including present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. The United States government compelled most Shawnees in Missouri to relocate to a 1.6 million-acre reservation in present-day Kansas, which included this 2,000-acre site. The Shawnee who relocated to Kansas included a branch of the tribe that had lived near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, after receiving a land grant from the Spanish government in 1793. While traditionalists continued to oppose assimilation and sought to maintain their way of life, by the 1790s, many tribal leaders saw little choice but to manage the transition under the best possible terms for their people. Others, like the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, opposed assimilation and sought to unite Native peoples until his death in the War of 1812. Today, a Kansas community near the capital is named after Tecumseh, while other cities are named in recognition of the missions that promoted assimilation.
In 1830, Methodist minister Thomas Johnson (1802-1865) was appointed by the church to go to present-day Wyandotte County to support their goal of converting the Shawnee. The Methodists had established several mission schools and had a history of working with Shawnee leaders in Ohio and Missouri. The site is home to a small library, and historians who volunteer at the site have found records that suggest that Johnson's arrival was at the request of Chief Fish, the leader of the Cape Girardeau branch of the Shawnee. Johnson was a slaveowner, and he arrived at the Shawnee reservation with the people he enslaved. Their labor helped Johnson establish a mission school in present-day Turner in 1830 that emphasized language training and manual labor. In 1839, Johnson relocated the mission to Fairway, closer to the Santa Fe Trail, and expanded operations to include a boarding school. Under his direction, free and enslaved laborers constructed the mission school and its buildings. The labor of students who attended the school also contributed to its creation and operation. Produce, handicrafts, and other items produced by the students were sold to help cover some of the school's costs. Between 1839 and 1862, students at the school came from twenty-two different tribes.
Shawnee Indian Mission and Territorial Kansas
The Shawnee Mission and its school encompassed 2,000 acres and sixteen buildings. Around 200 students were enrolled at the school at a time, drawn from the Shawnee as well as other tribes in Kansas, such as the Kaw, Munsee, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Otoe, Osage, Cherokee, Peoria, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Wea, Gros Ventres, Omaha, and Wyandot. The children were taught English and trade skills such as carpentry, domestic labor, and agriculture. Students woke up at 4:00 am and went to bed at 8:00 pm. Many days, the children attended classes for six hours and then performed chores (including cooking, cleaning, and farming) for another five hours. The children at this school were taught a variety of trade and manual labor skills. They also produced goods that were sold at area markets, with proceeds supporting the mission. As indicated by the site's National Register of Historic Places nomination form, the boys slept in the attic of the East Building after it was completed in 1841. The girls' dormitory was located in the North Building following its completion in 1845. The Johnson Family also lived in the North building.
Shortly after Kansas Territory was formally organized in 1854, many Native American tribes in this area were forced further west. The Shawnee Mission even served as the territory's capital for a short time. Pro-slavery members of the territorial legislature, who had secured control of the assembly in its early years, voted to move the capital from Pawnee to the Shawnee Mission in July of 1855. The move made the capital closer to Missouri, where many pro-slavery advocates illegally crossed the border to vote for pro-slavery candidates. For one month, the legislature held sessions here. The first territorial governor, Andrew H. Reeder, had his office here during that time.
Around the same time that the territorial legislature met here, the county was named in honor of Johnson, although his continued support of slavery became a divisive topic among some Methodists. On August 8, 1855, the legislature switched the capital again to Lecompton. Activity at the mission and school declined after the territorial government left. In 1858, Thomas Johnson handed over management of the institution to his son Alexander Johnson. While records are incomplete, historians who have studied the years leading up to the war believe that the situation for Native children declined in the years leading to the closure of the mission in 1862.
The United States Army utilized the property for barracks during part of the Civil War. Despite Reverend Thomas Johnson's support of slavery, he and many other residents of Kansas and Missouri who had hoped slavery would expand west decided to support the Union. Johnson was murdered in 1865, and by some accounts, his assailant was a pro-slavery partisan. After the war, the Johnson family was awarded ownership of the former mission which had been carved from the Shawnee's reservation. For the next six decades, mission buildings served various purposes, including a dance hall, a dairy bottling plant, an apartment complex, and a boarding house. In 1927, the State of Kansas acquired twelve acres of the former mission site and worked to preserve the remaining buildings. Since that time, the state has operated the former mission as a historical site.
Historic Interpretation and Operation of the Site
For many years, visitors were presented with a historical narrative that suggested the mission school was operated solely for the benefit of Native children. Today, visitors to the site learn more about the historical context that led to the school's creation, including the military and economic power that was being used to force Native peoples onto smaller and smaller reservations. While still emphasizing the efforts of missionaries and teachers, visitors learn that this was one of many privately operated mission schools in the antebellum era that sought to prepare Native children for life in a world that assumed their generation could only be domestic servants and laborers. Researchers have also been eager to learn more about the enslaved laborers who accompanied Johnson to Kansas and labored at the school. In recent years, more attention has been placed on the federal boarding school system that was established in the late 19th century. Those wanting to learn more about those reservations should consider some of the books in the sources section of this entry.
Today, the site is administered by the City of Fairway, the Kansas State Historical Society, and the Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. The property contains just twelve acres out of the original 2,000, along with three brick structures known today as the West Building, East Building, and North Building. The restored buildings house exhibits that share information about the Shawnee and other Native American tribes whose children attended this school, life on reservations, the Johnson family and other missionaries, and early political history in Kansas up to the Civil War. The mission was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Experiences of Native American Children and Families
The Indian Manual Labor School, as it became known in the 1840s, was one of many institutions established by governments and religious organizations to assimilate Native Americans into Western society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The school reflected an era when many in power advocated for the removal of Native tribes by force, while others advocated programs that encouraged assimilation. While this school differed from the federal government's vast network of boarding schools that emerged after the Civil War, both followed the doctrine of assimilation. The latter federal system often forcibly removed young Native people from their families, and the resulting displacement led to substantial malnourishment, disease, and death. This school, along with others operated by religious orders with the support of the federal government, predated the latter federal boarding school system in the antebellum period.
As visitors to the site learn, there are differences and similarities between boarding schools operated by religious groups such as the Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists in territorial Kansas and the latter system of federal boarding schools. The most exhaustive research into this boarding school comes from a Ph.D. dissertation by Kevin Abing that is included in the sources section of this entry. Abing spent years searching extant records, and most of what he and other historians have discovered comes from reports by school officials. Abing did discover several letters written between 1850 and 1860 by Native Americans in Kansas to federal officials that expressed concerns about the operation of the school and the welfare of the children. Complaints include concerns that parents were not kept informed about the health of their children. Other sources from school officials include notes of thankfulness that their school had been spared from a local cholera outbreak, along with praise for the work of the school's physician and reports from inspections. These primary sources and others, including other reports from school officials that emphasize health and well-being, will soon be available on the website for Shawnee Mission, thanks to the work of volunteers at the site.
The papers of Reverend Thomas Johnson were collected and given to Nathan Scarritt, another Methodist missionary and a prominent Kansas Citian, but they were destroyed in a fire. Written sources from the period are mostly limited to reports from teachers and school officials. These sources indicate a desire to help, and many young people learned language and trade skills at this school. Oral histories from Native Americans and recent articles and books on the topic often present a different perspective, emphasizing that mission schools compelled children to abandon their language, religion, and culture. Discipline at mission schools established before, during, and after the mid-19th century often included corporal punishment, and there are several records of Native American parents and leaders expressing concern about the operation of this school to federal officials. The Kansas Historical Society's records of the school do not include the names of students, and reports to the Methodist Church reveal few details about individual student experiences.
Available sources have led local researchers to conclude that fewer than half of the families in the area chose to send their children to this boarding school or the nearby schools operated by Baptists and Quakers in the 1850s. That most Native parents could refuse to send their children to these schools is one of the significant differences between the majority of missions operated by churches before the Civil War and the compulsory federal system of schools established in the late 19th and early 20th century. In addition, the decision of some area tribal leaders and parents to support this school in its early years must be placed in a historical context where Native parents made difficult decisions with limited options. In recent years, greater attention has been given to this context, and conversations and debates about managing this historic site continue to reflect the importance of the topic to Kansas and American history. The names of roads, creeks, rivers, and even cities in Kansas demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of Native American history.
Sources
Abing, Kevin J., "A fall from grace: Thomas Johnson and the Shawnee Indian Manual Labor School, 1839-1862" (1995). Dissertations (1962 - 2010) Access via Proquest Digital Dissertations. AAI9601766.
Abing, Kevin. “Before Bleeding Kansas.” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, Kansas History, 2001, www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2001spring_abing.pdf
Bear, Charla. “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.” NPR. May 12, 2008. Accessed July 19, 2021. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865.
Barnes, Chief Ben, Juliana Garcia, Steve Kraske, Conversation for KCUR Up To Date July 9, 2021. https://www.kcur.org/podcast/up-to-date/2021-07-09/tribe-demanding-search-for-childrens-graves-at-shawnee-indian-mission
Hogan, Suzanne. "Meet the Controversial Man Who Gave Johnson County its Name," February 5, 2015. https://www.kcur.org/community/2015-02-05/meet-the-controversial-man-who-gave-johnson-county-its-name
“Explore.” Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://shawneeindianmission.org/explore/.
“History of the People.” Shawnee Tribe. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://www.shawnee-nsn.gov/history.
“Kansas Territory.” Kansas Historical Society. July 2017. Accessed July 19, 2021. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/kansas-territory/14701.
Lissandrello, Stephen. “Shawnee Mission.” National Register of Historical Places Nomination Form. August 28, 1975. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/045b4ae1-3349-4086-bc6b-a0447bcee895.
Pember, Mary Annette. “Death by Civilization.” The Atlantic. March 8, 2019. Accessed July 19, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/traumatic-legacy-indian-boarding-schools/584293/.
“Shawnee Indians.” Kansas Historical Society. December 2017. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/shawnee-indians/19230.
“Shawnee Indians.” Ohio History Central. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Shawnee_Indians.
“Shawnee Indian Mission.” Kansas Historical Society. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/shawnee-indian-mission/11913.
“Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site, Fairway.” National Park Service. Accessed July 18, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/places/shawnee-indian-mission-state-historic-site-fairway.htm.
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Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge
Photo by David Trowbridge