The Place:
From the Wikipedia page for Lee's Summit, Missouri:
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Lee's Summit is a city located within the counties of Jackson (primarily) and Cass in the U.S. state of Missouri. As of the 2010 census its population was about 91,364, making it the sixth-largest city in both the state and in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area.
Founded as the "Town of Strother", by William B. Howard for his wife, Maria D. Strother (daughter of William D. Strother formerly of Bardstown, Kentucky). Howard came to Jackson County in 1842 from Kentucky, married Maria in 1844, and by 1850 he and Maria had 833 acres (3.37 km2) and a homestead five miles (8 km) north of town. There was also another town called Strother. He was arrested for being a Confederate in October 1862, near the beginning of the Civil War, and after being paroled he took his family back to Kentucky for the duration of the war. After the war ended he returned and, knowing that the Missouri Pacific Railroad was surveying a route in the area, platted the town with 70 acres (280,000 m2) in the fall of 1865 as the town of Strother.
In 1865 the town of Strother changed its name for early settler Dr. Pleasant John Graves Lea, who moved to Jackson County in 1849, from Bradley County, Tennessee. Lea was listed as the postmaster of Big Cedar in the 1855 United States Official Postal Guide. Dr. Lea was killed in August 1862 by Kansas Jayhawkers (or Redlegs).
When the surveyors for the Missouri Pacific Railroad came through, the local people and the railroad wanted to name the town in Dr. Lea's honor. He had a farm on the highest point and near the path of the tracks, and his murder had taken place near the site of the proposed depot. So they chose the name of "Lea's Summit", the "summit" portion to reflect its relatively highest elevation on the Missouri Pacific Railroad between St. Louis and Kansas City.[12] But they misspelled the name "Lees Summit" (with two "e's"; "Lee" instead of "Lea"; and leaving out the apostrophe) on a boxcar that was serving as a station and donated by the Missouri Pacific, then a sign next to the tracks, and finally in the printed time schedule for the railroad. Legend states that the name was spelled wrong on the side of the Missouri Pacific depot and has remained Lee's Summit ever since.
Others, claim that the town was named after famed Civil War General Robert E. Lee after Southerners began moving north into Missouri after the war due to the timing of General Lee's death compared to Dr. Lea's death. Attributed to a quote in the Louisville Journal, January 3, 1866.
Since the name was already being circulated and published with two "e's", the town petitioned the state legislature and incorporated its name in 1868 as: "Town of Lee's Summit".
The apostrophe in the town's name is unusual, in that most possessive place names lack an apostrophe, (i.e. Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and Boardmans Point, New Hampshire) while Lee's Summit has one. Apostrophes are typically not included in place names due to potential confusion, as it may imply that the place is owned by the person it is named after.
The growth of the town can be studied through historic Sanborn Maps, which document building types and uses in the city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In 1913, R.A. Long, the owner of a lumber company, began building his estate, named Longview Farm, on the western edge of the city and into part of Kansas City. When complete, it had a mansion, five barns and 42 buildings in the 1,700 acres (6.9 km2). (Harrison Metheny, grandfather of jazz legend Pat Metheny, was an electrician during Longview's construction.) The farm also had a church, Longview Chapel Christian Church, which was completed in 1915. It soon became internationally known as a showplace farm. Today, one of the horse barns is home to Longview Farm Elementary, and the site of Longview Community College. The church and mansion are on the National Register of Historic Places. Other parts of the farm have been turned into Longview Lake, Longview Community College, and a development called New Longview. Lee's Summit is also home to Missouri Town 1855 and Lee's Summit Historical Cemetery.
In 2006, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Lee's Summit 44th on its list of the "100 Best Cities to Live in the United States."[19] That ranking improved to 27th on the 2010 list.
The Person:
From the Kansas City Public Library:
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The Confederate general had nothing to do with it. Someone who’d been working on the railroad didn’t know how to spell.
Lee’s Summit, Missouri, has an elementary school, a middle school, and a 16-1/2 acre park, all within a few blocks of each other, all bearing the name Pleasant Lea.
A lea is a grassland or a meadow. It would be reasonable to think that the two schools and the park got their names because they were situated by a grassy meadow that was enjoyable in quiet way—a meadow that was called Pleasant Lea.
But they didn’t.
They were given that name to honor an individual—Dr. Pleasant Lea, who owned the land containing the summit that gave its name to the town. Looking across the south central part of Jackson County, “summit” may not be the first word to come to mind. Different sources, though, tell us that Dr. Lea’s land contained the highest elevation along the railroad tracks that connected Kansas City and St. Louis. So yes, the town was named Lea’s Summit. “Lee’s Summit” was the sign-painting-on-the-side-of-a-boxcar equivalent of a typographical error.
Pleasant John Graves Lea was born in Tennessee to Major Lea, Jr. and Rhoda Jarnagin Lea in late 1807. Some sources give the month as September, and some as November. And some sources give the location as Jefferson County, and some as Caswell County.
Dr. Lea’s niece, Myra Inman, kept a diary during the Civil War, which was published by Mercer University Press in 2000, edited by William R. Snell, under the title A Diary of the Civil War in East Tennessee. She referred to him as Uncle Pleasant (his sister, Anna, was Myra’s mother). Though he moved to Jackson County, Missouri (no later than 1850, when he is listed there in the Federal Census), he and several of his offspring are mentioned in the diary.
Dr. Lea’s grandfather was Major Lea, Sr., born in 1759, and his great-great grandfather was James Lea, the ancestor who emigrated from England to the Americas. James was born at Lea Hall in Wimboldsley, Cheshire County, in 1718. He came to America while in his early 20s, and settled briefly in Virginia before moving to Orange County, North Carolina, which was later renamed Caswell County.
Dr. Lea’s father was Major Lea, Jr., born in Orange County in 1775, and his mother was Rhoda Jarnagin Lea, who gave birth to nine children in all. After Rhoda’s husband died, she lived with Anna Inman and her family. In 1838, when he was 31, P.J.G. married Lucinda Callaway in Bradley County, Tennessee. Lucinda was born in 1821, and so would have been 17 years old, or 16 going on 17, at the time of the wedding. They had nine children.
Bradley County had been created in 1836, named for Col. Edward Bradley, who had led the East Tennessee militia during the War of 1812. Foster County and Rutledge County had been proposed as names, before the legislature settled on Bradley. Even after the Bradley name had been inserted into the organizing bill, some in the state senate tried to change it to Cleveland, to honor Col. Benjamin Cleveland, a North Carolina hero of the Revolutionary War (and distant cousin of future president Grover Cleveland).
By 1835 a white settlement had been established in what became Bradley County, and, in accordance with the dictates of the law that established Bradley County, when it was selected to be the county seat, it was given the name of Cleveland.
P.J.G. Lea was one of the founders of Cleveland, Tennessee, and one of its first commissioners.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Lea’s step-granddaughter, Claudine Sowell Chandler, wrote a short memoir of her step-father, Thomas C. Lea, Sr., Dr. Lea’s oldest son, for the Jackson County Historical Society, the first part of which shares Lea family stories handed down to her. In the fall of 1981 it appeared in the Kansas City Genealogist. Mrs. Chandler tells us that Dr. Lea graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in the spring of 1847. (The school was founded in 1824, and is still in existence as part of Thomas Jefferson University.) He came back to Cleveland and tended to his medical practice for two years. Dr. Lea also owned a pharmacy. (One of his employees was John G. Carter, who married his niece Darthula Inman. Nearly two decades later, a year or two after his wife died, Carter married Darthula’s younger sister, Myra.)
It says something about Lea’s importance to Cleveland that the town’s principal street, much broader than the other streets (it was said that it was wide enough for four to six teams of horses to turn), the street that came out of the original route for the stagecoach, on which the original settlers built homes, was named Lea Street in honor of the good doctor. Several decades later, Lea Street’s name was changed to Broad Street, over the objections of older residents.
The 1850 census lists P.J.G. and Lucinda’s family as living in Missouri. The records for the Lee’s Summit Cemetery list Lucinda’s year of death as 1857. Based on fragments of a letter written to one of his sisters, Lucinda’s death seems to have hit Dr. Lea very hard. In the years following Lucinda’s death, and during the war, Myra Inman’s journal tells of Dr. Lea and members of his family making visits back to Cleveland.
Chandler reports that Dr. Lea and his family headed out for Missouri on October 9, 1849, accompanied by at least one neighbor, a Mr. Bradford, and that:
Besides Dr. Lea’s nine children, [there] were ten others, including babies. These little busy-bodies knew not nor feared danger. After awhile [sic], they sought their own wagon, and soon [were] lost in deep sleep.
One night the Lea children were all accounted for except one little girl—Mary—age eleven. The entire camp was aroused and a quick active search was made. No signs, no answers to [c]alls, no footprints, nothing to reveal the whereabouts of the little Mary.
At last, in their sadness, the caravan proceeded on the morning of the fourth day. ... Dr. Lea left three slaves, young Tom (aged 10) and three other riders to continue the search.
For two days nothing was heard. Only Tom returned, a frightened boy. All he and the three white searchers found were dead horses, dead negro slaves ... and an Indian moccasin!
The caravan proceeded on its journey, with a mother filled with sorrow and grief.
While it is very possible that something tragic happened on the journey from Tennessee to Missouri, comparing Chandler’s account (which would have been stories told to her by her step-father’s family) with the Federal Census records shows some major discrepancies. The 1840 Census, which only lists names for the heads of households, shows only one free white female in the household, which would be Lucinda, who was 19 at the time. “Mary” would have been born the year before Thomas. The 1850 Census (the year after the journey) does list a Mary, who was two. This means she would have been in her first year or second year during the journey from Tennessee, which would mean that the Lea family had two daughters named Mary who were living at the same time.
This is not to say that there was no truth to Chandler’s story, but that through the years the narrative of the story she inherited had gone through some changes. She says that the deep grief that came with Mary’s loss finally led to Mrs. Lea’s death. (Lucinda Lea died in 1857, some eight years later.)