That’s correct. Summerlin was the maiden name of Howard Hughes’s paternal grandmother, Jean Amelia Summerlin.
Howard Hughes’s grandfather, Felix Turner Hughes, was a lawyer in Missouri when he met and married Jean Amelia Summerlin in 1865. They had eight children (five survived childhood), the second of whom was Howard Robard Hughes, our Howard Hughes's father.
Howard Senior studied law at Harvard and the University of Iowa, returned to Missouri to join Felix’s law firm, but left to find his fortune in mining and oil. He wound up in Oil City, Louisiana, where he invented an efficient bit for drilling for oil. With that early success, he started up Hughes Tool Co., headquartered in Houston. He married Allene Gano and had Howard the Second in 1905 (Hughes was born the same year as Las Vegas -- and Bugsy Siegel). Allene Hughes died in 1922; Howard Senior died two years later, leaving the bulk of his wealth to their 18-year-old only son.
In the early ‘50s, Howard Junior made a complicated land swap with the federal government and wound up with tens of thousands of acres of desert scrub on the west side of Las Vegas Valley. He wanted to move his airplane division, Hughes Aircraft, to the land, which he dubbed Husite. Unfortunately, none of his key executives, managers, or mechanics were keen on desert exile, so that plan fell through. The acreage sat there, owned and neglected by Hughes’s Summa Corporation, for decades. In the mid-‘80s, Summa announced plans for Summerlin, the largest master-planned community in the U.S., now encompassing 22,500 acres and 30,000 homes.
