History of Kenyon

In 1855, the first settlers arrived in the

area.

L.N. Bye settled in the north corner of sections 7 and 8. Christian and Sever Halvorson settled in section 18 just west of the Old Stone Church, whose construction didn’t start until 1871. L.A. Felt built the first building in town on the north side of the Zumbro in 1856.

These four men were the first to open up the Kenyon area.

The following year in May 1856, James A. Day and James M. LaDuc came and made claims to where the village is now situated. LaDuc named it Kenyon after his alma mater, Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The year 1857 was busy. A steam saw mill was built. It stood where the swimming pool is now. In March, Stephen Bullis established Kenyon’s first hotel, “The Pioneer,” on the corner just west of Roseview apartments. The village boomed with the arrival of the Chicago Great Western Railroad in 1885. A store was opened by P.L. Berg in the area of Kenyon Ace Hardware. By 1893, the village had two hotels, a foundry and machine shop, a large brick school building, a tannery, two banks, a flouring mill and a weekly newspaper. A second railroad, the Chicago Milwaukee, came along in 1903.

The small village continued to prosper until 1908 when the “April Fool’s Day Fire”

destroyed seven businesses along Main Street.

Momentum was regained after World War I and after the worst of the Great Depression. Kenyon Municipal Utilities took over electrical service in 1932 and has maintained it ever since. Telephone service, started by Dr. Joseph A. Gates in 1901, was continuously improved until a modern exchange connected all residents with service.

The school in Kenyon was accredited in 1896. In 1915, the voters of Kenyon decided a new school building was needed. Work on the $62,000 structure was completed by mid-December that year and the building was dedicated in 1916. A new gymnasium/ auditorium was added in 1938 and another addition was done in 1962. A new elementary school and Picha Memorial Field were constructed in 1954. Kenyon schools combined with Wanamingo in the fall of 1990 and became District 2172.

A new Kenyon-Wanamingo Middle High School was erected in 1998 alongside the former elementary building, housing grades 5-12. A monument to the old school building is currently being designed using the decorative egg and scroll pediment and cast nameplate saved from the original 1916 building, which was demolished in 2013.