A Brief History of Lyon

In the 1700s, the Sauk and Meskwaki had allied against the French, abandoned their ancestral land, and eventually made their way into the region that was now Lyon. Decades later, French-Canadian fur traders and miners—their grandfathers and grandmothers having abandoned their own ancestral land generations earlier—established the first European settlements. The French controlled, or at least claimed to control, the area until ceding it to Spain in the mid-1700s. Napoleon reappropriated it for the French Republic but eventually charged François Barbé-Marbois to negotiate its sale to the United States. Jefferson and Madison persuaded Congress to ratify the Louisiana Purchase, and Lyon was within the vast swath of land that was officially opened to U.S. settlement. That same year, Father Jean-Jacques Françesco arrived as a missionary and established the first Catholic parish.

Lead was first discovered in the area in the late seventeenth century, but the land would not give up its elements easily. For much of the eighteenth century, surface scratching was only successful enough to sustain the prospectors hopes and keep them scratching. It never lived up to the promises made by the initial French settlers who sold the land before moving on. Early large-scale mining efforts proved fruitless. Flooding in 1833 and then a cholera outbreak the following year decimated the population and the productive capacity of Lyon. Impoverished and afflicted by disease, many of the French and Spanish settlers placed blame for the outbreak on the Irish immigrants who had recently made their way into the area. Violence, work stoppages, and deaths contributed to a two-year period of profound economic stagnation.

In his sermons, Father Françesco pleaded for unity and harmony, but to little effect. Upon learning that he was being called back to Florence, he determined that, prior to departing, he would gather his congregation and bless the bluffs and the prairies that extended to the west, so that they might bring forth their abundance. Fortuitously, less than a week later, and only two days after his departure, a minor earthquake—unusual and unheard of to the colonial occupiers, but actually an occasional occurrence—caused a fissure to open at the crest of the bluff where laborers were working to clear timber for a new cemetery. A brilliant vein of lead was found within one of the caverns, and soon the fortunes of Lyon shifted.

While the lead boom was, in the grand scheme of things, rather brief, it saw Lyon through the initiation of the Civil War and was a source of capital for the families that went on to build the saw mills that processed timber that was sent floating down the river from the northern forests. As the largest of the once-productive lead mines were being abandoned, the city was transitioning into becoming a hub for the timber industry. Although the locals had essentially preserved the French pronunciation, continuing to refer to their small city as “lee-own,” by 1900 it was mostly populated by German and Irish Catholics. Soon thereafter, the northern forests were depleted, and the sawmills were shuttered. Since the few remaining smaller lead mines and smelters had been an ancillary enterprise for the McNaughton family, when they closed their mill they also abandoned the last of the mines. Although they had lived in Lyon for two generations, the McNaughtons were only wedded to the potential profits that the locale offered; hence, when the tides started to turn, they liquidated their assets and moved to California.

Well into the 1950s, the citizens of Lyon would commemorate Françesco’s blessing of their hills and the wealth and prosperity that God had subsequently bestowed upon them and their ancestors. But in the aftermath of World War II, the city had long abandoned any obvious economic connection to the land. By the late 50s, it was home to three industrial plants, the largest of which blighted the southern edge of the city, stretching for nearly two miles along the portion of the river known as the Narrows. The smoke that billowed incessantly from the facility’s numerous stacks smelled awful, and on foggy, downcast days, the stench would hang in the air, enveloping the neighborhoods. While farmers in far-flung agricultural communities might very well have found it in them to give thanks for the fertilizer being synthesized in Lyon and dumped by the tons on their fields, increasingly fewer residents of the city felt any sense of thanksgiving for the first missionary and his miraculous blessing. It is hard to give thanks to the land when one’s nostrils are assaulted by the acrid fumes of industrialization.