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 five children (who survived childbirth), the second of whom was Howard Robard, Howard the Second’s father.
Howard Senior studied law at Harvard and the University of Iowa, returned 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 Company, 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, Hughes 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. So the acreage sat there, owned and neglected by Hughes’s Summa Corporation, till the mid-‘80s, when it announced plans for the Summerlin, the largest master-planned community in the U.S., encompassing 22,500 acres and 30,000 homes.
However, as big as Summerlin is, it’s simply a subdivision, not an official Census, post office, or governmental designation.
It’s no different from any other developer’s subdivision in the Valley, for example: the Tahoe subdivision between Flamingo and Twain west of Rainbow; the Desert Shores subdivision west of there; the Lynbrook subdivision in Henderson; or the Aboveground Hydrogen Bomb Test Site subdivision that we just made up.
Mail that goes to people who live in these, and the hundreds of other privately named developments in the City of Las Vegas and the unincorporated Clark County, all share Las Vegas, NV, addresses.
