Lanyon is an unincorporated community in Lost Grove Township in Webster County, Iowa.

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

[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.

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.