Thomas Johnson was a controversial man, both in the past and present. He is the namesake of the most populated county in the state of the Kansas, and ironically was a slaveholder in what is now known as the “free state.” Reverend Thomas Johnson was born on July 11, 1802 in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and later moved to Missouri. He married Sarah Davis in Clarksville, Missouri in 1830, and that same year he and Sarah arrived in present-day Turner (Wyandotte County) Kansas to start the Shawnee Indian Mission.
Johnson was a Methodist Minister, but he was also an early state politician. He was elected to the Kansas Territory Legislature, which temporarily designated the Shawnee Indian Mission as the capital and site of the Legislative vote in 1855. Johnson was still pro-slavery/pro-Southern and being that the Mission sat directly next to the Missouri (slave state) border, many Missouri residents hopped the border and voted illegally in 1855 for Kansas to come into the Union as a slave state. The vote was thrown out (due to voter fraud) and is now known as the Bogus Legislature in Kansas state history. The Shawnee Indian Mission closed in 1862 and Thomas and Sarah moved back to Missouri before the Battle of Westport. Although he had signed allegiance to the Unionist cause prior to the civil war (after Kansas came into the Nation as a Free State), he had sons who fought on both the Union and Confederate sides. Johnson was a complicated man who was murdered outside of his home in Kansas City, Missouri in January 1865. It is still an unsolved murder mystery today! For more information, visit this article written in 2018, which looks at this complicated existence.
