Johnston Lykins Missionary, Doctor, and Kansas City’S Second Mayor 1800-1876

Missouri Valley Special Collections Johnston Lykins Missionary, Doctor, and Kansas City’s Second Mayor 1800-1876

by Daniel Coleman

Johnston Lykins is possibly associated with more Kansas City “firsts” than any other early settler; when he does not bear the title himself, as in “first duly-elected mayor,” it is bestowed on groups or organizations he helped to found, such as the area’s first bank, newspaper, and Baptist church. But it is important to remember that Lykins’ early life was much different than those who knew him only as a wealthy civic booster.

Johnston Lykins was born in Virginia on April 15, 1800, and spent much of his boyhood in Kentucky and Indiana. He studied and taught at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and later studied medicine at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. In the summer of 1822 Lykins heeded a call to become a Baptist missionary, and that winter he headed west to Michigan, where he lived and worked among Native Americans for the next several years.

Lykins became acquainted with missionary leader Isaac McCoy in Michigan and married McCoy’s 19-year old daughter, Delilah, in February 1828. When the Indian Removal Act of 1830 established reservations for a number of eastern tribes in an “Indian Territory” near the junction on the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the Rev. Isaac McCoy was among the first missionaries to travel there. His daughter and new son-in-law soon followed, arriving in 1831 to help establish the Shawnee Baptist Mission, located near Turkey Creek in what later became Johnson County, Kansas.

For the next 20 years Johnston Lykins and his family worked as frontier religious missionaries in Indian Territory. At the Shawnee Baptist Mission they established a manual labor school for Native Americans, and Lykins worked for years to translate portions of the Bible, hymns, and lessons into several Indian languages. After obtaining a printing press, he and fellow missionary Jotham Meeker published Kansas’s first newspaper, the Shawnee language Siwinowe Kesibwe (Shawnee Sun).

In the 1840s, Lykins received an appointment to be the official U.S. government physician to the Potawatomi Indians in today’s Franklin

The Kansas City Public Library | 14 W. 10th St. | Kansas City, MO 64105 | 816.701.3427 | kchistory.org Missouri Valley Special Collections

County, Kansas. While serving as a doctor to the Potawatomi, Lykins also treated his wife for a disease he was unable to cure. Delilah Lykins died tragically of tuberculosis in 1844, just two months shy of her 35th birthday.

Within several years, Johnston Lykins concluded his three decades of work among the Indians and began a new chapter of his life in the newly incorporated Town of Kansas, as Kansas City was then officially named. He married his second wife, Miss Martha A. Livingston of Lexington, Missouri. (She would become better known as Mattie Lykins, the vocal Confederate supporter who married artist George Caleb Bingham after Lykin’s passing).

During the next 25 years, Lykins stepped into the roles of civic leader, banker, and real estate developer, platting two of Kansas City’s earliest residential areas. As President of the first City Council, he was appointed mayor when the first mayor, William Gregory, stepped down after the discovery that he lived outside city limits. Lykins was duly elected for a complete term in the next election in April 1854. He was also the first president of Mechanics Bank, one of the city’s earliest financial institutions.

Another first for which Lykins was known should not go unmentioned. In the late 1850s, he and wife Mattie oversaw the construction of what was by all accounts Kansas City’s first mansion, located on 12th Street between Broadway and Washington. Built in the classic revival style, the home’s 14 rooms contained 10 fireplaces. Its circular staircases and crystal chandeliers gave citizens of the new town, who were accustomed to wooden sidewalks and livestock roaming their muddy streets, a landmark about which they could boast. Lykins claimed a luxury here that he may have craved at times during the difficult struggles of his missionary years. He died at age 76 on August 15, 1876.

Sources

Beachy, E. B. Dykes. “Skillful Hand of Dr. Johnston Lykins Helped to Guide City’s Early Growth.” Kansas City Star, 15 Aug. 1950.

Campbell, Robert Allen. Campbell’s Gazetteer of Missouri. St. Louis, MO: R. A. Campbell, 1875.

Deatherage, Charles P. Early History of Greater Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas. Kansas City, MO: C. P. Deatherage, 1927.

Green, George Fuller. A Condensed History of the Kansas City Area.

The Kansas City Public Library | 14 W. 10th St. | Kansas City, MO 64105 | 816.701.3427 | kchistory.org Missouri Valley Special Collections

Kansas City, MO: Lowell Press, 1968.

Lee, Fred L. “Dr. Johnston Lykins: Baptist Missionary, Realtor, Doctor, First Legal Mayor of Kansas City.” Kansas City Genealogist 36 (Winter 1996): 155-158.

The Kansas City Public Library | 14 W. 10th St. | Kansas City, MO 64105 | 816.701.3427 | kchistory.org Missouri Valley Special Collections

The Kansas City Public Library | 14 W. 10th St. | Kansas City, MO 64105 | 816.701.3427 | kchistory.org