LYON COUNTY GENEALOGY
RAILROADS
But few counties in Iowa have better railway facilities than Lyon. The great systems here represented are: the Rock Island; Illinois Central; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha and the Great Northern.
The first railway to enter the county was the "Milwaukee" in 1879--its line from Sioux City to Sioux Falls, with a station at Beloit. Every township but two, Grant and Centennial, now have one or more roads, giving freight and passenger service in almost any given direction. Some of these railways cost the pioneers dearly, in way of taxes, land grants, and personal subscriptions, and others of later date came on their own account. The completion of the Rock Island (then called the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern), in 1886, gave a direct eastern outlet and greatly assisted in building up the country, as did the Sioux Falls branch of the Illinois Central, a little later on.
To show the marked contrast between early day and present times, in way of getting crops to market, the following is furnished by one of the early homesteaders: "In the early days of the county, the nearest shipping points were Sioux City and LeMars, but within a few years the railroad came to Sibley and that became the nearest and most patronized. C.K. Howard was the principal monied man of the country and all the wheat was sold to him by the farmers, he hiring them to haul it to the nearest shipping points, paying, usually, twenty cents per bushel. Old settlers all well remember how they frequently saw a string of ox-trains stretching over the unbroken prairies, from one to two miles in length, on their way to market their grain."
Webization by Kermit Kittleson - Aug. 2006