As the early settlers came and homesteaded in Smith County, a post office and village were established on Middle Oak Creek in the early 1870's. A group of settlers asked Jackson "Jack" Allen, a Bible student and leading literary man of the day, to select the name for the town. "Why not go to the Bible?" was his first inspiration. Searching its pages, he stopped when he read of The Cedars of Lebanon and suggested that name. Nobody opposed, and the name of Lebanon was recorded in the records in 1873.
It was in October of 1887 that the residents of Old Lebanon picked up their very town, down to the foundations, and moved it two and one half miles northeast. The people of Old Lebanon moved because the Rock Island Railroad, threading its way across Kansas toward the west, missed old Lebanon.
