[5][6] It is bordered by the cities of Shawnee to the north, Overland Park to the east, De Soto to the west and Olathe to the south.

Twelve years before the town of Lenexa was platted, James Butler Hickok staked a claim on 160 acres (65 ha) at what is now the corner of 83rd and Clare Road.

[7] Filed in 1857, the claim was not far from the Kansas River, and was 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Westport, Missouri, and the start of the Santa Fe Trail.

At about the same time as Hickok filed his claim, a census of the Shawnee Indians living in the area was being taken, and one of the residents listed was Na-Nex-Se Blackhoof.

She was the widow of Chief Blackhoof, the second signer of the 1854 treaty that ceded 1,600,000 acres (650,000 ha) of the Kansas Shawnee Indian reservation to the United States government.

In 1865, the Kansas and Neosho Valley Railroad was organized to take advantage of favorable new land laws.

It later changed its name to Missouri River, Ft. Scott and Gulf Railroad, and in 1869 purchased a right-of-way from C.A.

Bradshaw also sold 10.5 acres (4.2 ha) to Octave Chanute, a railroad civil engineer, who platted the town in 1869.

Legend states that the first town name proposed was "Bradshaw", but Bradshaw modestly refused and the name "Lenexa", a derivation of the name Na-Nex-Se,[citation needed] the name of Shawnee Chief Thomas Blackhoof's wife, was adopted.

[8] The 2020 United States census counted 57,434 people, 23,934 households, and 15,432 families in Lenexa.

[20][21] The ancestry of Lenexa in 2020 was 25.5% German, 13.3% Irish, 13.2% English, 3.9% Italian, 2.3% French, 2.1% Scottish, 2.0% Polish, 2.0% Norwegian, and 1.9% Subsaharan African.

The facility stores federal records from agencies in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska including Department of Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service.

[27] The facility is also known informally as "The Caves" and is known to store items from the trauma room at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, where John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead following his assassination.

The International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education is based in Lenexa; its competitive peer, the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs, is based in neighboring Overland Park.

Each June the city hosts "The Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle", which is also the Kansas State Championship.

The church hosts a SerbFest every year in the summer and a Food Festival and Bazaar in the fall.