Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in De Soto, KS

De Soto is a city along the Kansas River in Johnson and Leavenworth counties, part of the Kansas City metropolitan area.

The city was platted in the spring of 1857 and named for the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, and it was incorporated on October 1, 1897.

Before the town existed, the Black Bob band of Shawnee settled in and around present-day De Soto in 1828 after resisting removal, and the Shawnee agency known as Lexington stood at the southern edge of today's city.

De Soto is the only city in Johnson County originally platted around the Kansas River, and four of the river's tributaries, Captain Creek, Kill Creek, Cedar Creek and Camp Creek, end within the city limits.

The 2020 census counted 6,118 people in De Soto, living in 2,295 households and 1,635 families.

De Soto stayed tiny for most of its history, with just 226 residents in 1900 and 518 in 1950, before Kansas City suburban growth pushed it past 6,000 people by 2020.

The 9,080-acre Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant south of De Soto transformed the town in World War II: a May 1943 Kansas City Star report described the population jumping from 400 to 1,000 in under a year, and the plant produced until it closed in 1993.

In the Great Flood of 1951, the Kansas River crested at 42.3 feet at De Soto, the highest crest recorded on the river during the flood, leaving most of downtown under more than four feet of water in places.

In July 2022 Panasonic announced it would build an electric vehicle battery plant of more than $4 billion on the former Sunflower ammunition plant site, the largest single private investment in Kansas history, and the site was renamed Astra Enterprise Park.

Panasonic's De Soto plant has begun producing cylindrical lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and is expected to employ about 4,000 people at full operation.