Lanyon is an unincorporated community in Lost Grove Township in Webster County, Iowa.
Geography It is located 17 miles south of the county seat of Fort Dodge, 2.65 miles south and one mile west of Harcourt (on U.S. Route 169), 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.
History The community was founded by Swedish emigrants,Jonathan Eig, “Get Capone: the secret plot that captured America's most wanted gangster,” p. 68 (2010). part of a migration from Knox County, Illinois in the 1860s.Tom Savage, “A Dictionary of Iowa Place Names,” pp. 127-28 (2007). The population was 105 in 1940.
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.The Fort Dodge, Des Moines and Southern Railroad, accessed February 20, 2011. 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."Fort Dodge Line Traced Back to 1893," Boone News-Republican, September 15, 1965 at p. 10; "Complete New Line," Daily Iowa Capitol, November 17, 1899 at p. 7. A Lanyon Post Office was established in 1900,"Iowa Happenings at Washington," Des Moines Leader, January 25, 1900 at p.2. the Lanyon Mutual Telephone Company was established in 1903, and the Bank of Lanyon, Lanyon Well Company, and (until the early 1960s) Lanyon Consolidated School. Lanyon is now within the Prairie Valley Community School District.
It includes the Evangelical Covenant Church, founded in 1877 and located in Lanyon since 1909.
Education Previously it was in the Prairie Valley Community School District, - As this is a predecessor district, all Prairie Valley CSD areas were added to Southeast Valley CSD in 2023. which formed on July 1, 1993 with the merger of the Cedar Valley Community School District and the Prairie Community School District."REORGANIZATION & DISSOLUTION ACTIONS SINCE 1965-66 ." Iowa Department of Education. Retrieved on February 23, 2019. Prairie Valley CSD merged into the Southeast Valley Community School District in 2023. This district includes the Southeast Valley Middle School in Burnside and Southeast Valley High School in Gowrie.
Notable people George E. Q. Johnson, United States attorney who successfully prosecuted Al Capone for tax evasion Obed Simon Johnson, author of "A Study of Chinese Alchemy". Jon Lindgren, mayor of Fargo, North Dakota from 1978 to 1994
References