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.
The community was founded by Swedish emigrants,[2] part of a migration from Knox County, Illinois in the 1860s.[3] The population was 105 in 1940.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6] A Lanyon Post Office was established in 1900,[7] 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.
^"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.
^"Iowa Happenings at Washington," Des Moines Leader, January 25, 1900 at p.2.
^"Community". Southeast Valley Community School District. Archived from the original on October 25, 1997. Retrieved November 11, 2023. - As this is a predecessor district, all Prairie Valley CSD areas were added to Southeast Valley CSD in 2023.