Lanyon, Iowa

Lanyon
Unincorporated community
Lanyon Location within the state of Iowa
Coordinates: 42°13′20.92″N 94°11′42.86″W / 42.2224778°N 94.1952389°WCoordinates: 42°13′20.92″N 94°11′42.86″W / 42.2224778°N 94.1952389°W
Country	United States
State	Iowa
County	Webster
Elevation	1,138 ft (347 m)
Time zone	Central (CST) (UTC-6)
• Summer (DST)	CDT (UTC-5)
ZIP codes	50544

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 1 mile west of Harcourt (on U.S. Highway 169), and 3.3 miles north and 4.5 miles west of Boxholm. It is made up 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.

Its elevation is 1,171 feet (357 m).^[1]

History

The community was founded by Swedish emigrants,^[2] part of a migration from Knox County, Illinois in the 1860s.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5] Lanyon was the site of a U.S. Post Office (established in 1900),^[6] the Lanyon Mutual Telephone Company (established in 1903), 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.

Notable residents and natives

• George E.Q. Johnson, United States Attorney for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois who successfully prosecuted Al Capone for tax evasion
• Jon Lindgren, Mayor of Fargo, North Dakota from 1978 to 1994, the second longest serving mayor of Fargo.

References

1. U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Lanyon, Iowa, Geographic Names Information System, 1979-04-30. Accessed 2008-04-08.
2. Jonathan Eig, “Get Capone: the secret plot that captured America's most wanted gangster,” p. 68 (2010).
3. Tom Savage, “A Dictionary of Iowa Place Names,” p. 127-28 (2007).
4. The Fort Dodge, Des Moines and Southern Railroad, accessed 2011-02-20.
5. "Fort Dodge Line Traced Back to 1893," Boone News-Republican, 1965-09-15 at p. 10; "Complete New Line," Daily Iowa Capitol, 1899-11-17 at p. 7.
6. "Iowa Happenings at Washington," Des Moines Leader, 1900-01-25 at p.2.