This town actually began about 1873. In 1875 Nero Jones, a licensed trader, opened his store at the Shawneetown location.  W.L. Austin was the manager of the store for Jones.  Fifteen year old Thomas Alford, an Absentee Shawnee Indian, was hired as an interpreter at this store, as most of the customers could not speak English, nor could the store manager speak the language of the Shawnee tribe.

Others associated with Shawneetown:
Robert Deer lived near the new town.  He was later hired as a government interpreter for $100 a year. 
Louis C. Tyner moved his Trading Post from north and near the Shawnee Mission in 1876 to Shawneetown, moving not only all his merchandise, but dismantling the logs in the cabin to move them too.  Three years later, both Tyner and Jones had closed their stores in the town.  Then a new Trading Post firm of Blossom & Clay opened their store in 1879 on the next hill, about a quarter of a mile west of the present Shawnee Mission Cemetery. 
David Crockett Blossom first came to Kansas in 1869, and established a line of freight between Tokoka, Emporia and Newton, Kansas, and later to Wichita.  In 1870 and 1871 he was a freighter for the M.K.&T. Railroad.  In 1879 he entered into a partnership with Samuel Clay, and opened a Trading Post store at Shawneetown.  D.C. Blossom married Miss Emma Charles, whose father, Joll Charles was superintendent of the Shawnee Mission School. 
Other merchants arrived here later, including the Berry brothers, Captain S.J. Scott and John C. King.  Scott was later instrumental in getting the County seat established at Tecumseh when this area was opened to white settlement in 1891.  Antoine and Mary Bourbonnais built their log cabin in Shawneetown in the early 1880s.

It is difficult to separate the history of Shawneetown from that of nearby Shawnee Mission.  Although they were two towns.  The Shawnee Boarding School was supervised by the government through it's Indian Agent at the Sac & Fox Agency and reservation, 35 miles north.

Harriet Patrick, daughter of Colonel Lee Patrick, Indian Agent at the Sac and Fox Agency near Stroud, taught school at the Shawnee Mission Boarding School, then at Shawneetown after teaching at the Sac & Fox Agency School.  Jim Thorpe was one of her pupils there.

The old West Shawnee Trail came through Pottawatomie County, passing the east edge of Shawneetown, from Arkansas City and exiting the county just north of the extreme southeast corner, cutting across the corner of the Seminole Indian Nation and continuing southeasterly to Boggy Depot.