Bingham Elementary School was built in 1956 as part of a massive growth in facilities provided by funds from a tax levy increase approved by voters. It was one of many new elementary schools under the leadership of Superintendent of Schools Willard Graff.

The school was named after American realist artist and Missourian George Caleb Bingham. Much of Bingham's art reflects life on the Missouri River and in the frontier land. The artist was eight when his family moved to Missouri. He apprenticed with a cabinet maker and with a portrait artist and then spent three months at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Bingham studied art with the members of the Dusseldorf School in Dusseldorf, Germany. He turned to politics in the post-Civil War years and served as state treasurer and adjutant general. He was president of the Board of Police Commissioners for Kansas City, Missouri. Toward the end of his life he was a professor of art at the University of Missouri - Columbia. He died July 7, 1879.