Lanyon, Iowa


Lanyon is an unincorporated community in Lost Grove Township in Webster County, Iowa, United States. It is located 17 miles south of the county seat of Fort Dodge, 2.65 miles south and one mile west of Harcourt, and 3.3 miles north and 4.5 miles west of Boxholm. Lanyon consists of seven blocks, bounded on the north by 390th Street, and on the east by Lanyon Avenue. It includes the Evangelical Covenant Church, founded in 1877 and located in Lanyon since 1909.
Lanyon's elevation is 1,171 feet.

History

The community was founded by Swedish emigrants, part of a migration from Knox County, Illinois in the 1860s.
It is located on the diagonal route of a former interurban railroad between Boone and Rockwell City, which was used by the Fort Dodge, Des Moines and Southern Railroad until the 1960s. A station at Layton was opened in 1899 to serve a railway laid that year by the Marshalltown and Dakota Railroad Company to carry coal mined near Fraser northwest to connections at Gowrie. A Lanyon Post Office was established in 1900, the Lanyon Mutual Telephone Company was established in 1903, and the Bank of Lanyon, Lanyon Well Company, and Lanyon Consolidated School. Lanyon is now within the Prairie Valley Community School District.

Notable people