Abridged from the book
"From Entry Fee to 'Fifty-Three"
by Ruth Bogart Roney
The history of Lawson begins with the arrival of the first settlers from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The migration began in 1822 and continued for more than a third of a century. Numbers came from the four states east of Missouri, and from New York. There were even a few from across the Atlantic.

As in every frontier community, churches were the first organized bodies, and schools and towns came next. Lisbonville formerly stood near the center of the very earliest settlement made in the northwest part of today's Ray county. It operated south and east of today's Elmira. John Fields of Kentucky, Samuel MeGee of Tennessee, and John Taylor of Virginia took out that wooded territory. It lay north of the middle fork of Crooked river.

The second settlement, within the confines of the present Lawson community, was made some six miles south of there, in another thick woods. This area was drained by a lower tributary of the above river. The following names are closely associated with these two neighborhoods, according to the Ray county history of 1881: J. Allen, Archibald and J.H. Moss, and Randolph McDonald, all of Kentucky; Milton Piercey, Robert G. Murray, John Halstead, Josiah and Henry S. Patton, Solomon Wilson ‏(wine maker and great hunter)‏, James Rippey, Joshua Albright ‏(gunsmith)‏, John A. Cooper, and Henry and Whidby Wilson from North Carolina; William and John Cox, Jesse Mann, John Connard, and A.B. Arnote from Tennessee; Jeremiah Whitsett and Benjamin McClain from Guilford county, North Carolina; D.G. Stockwell, Stephen Goddard, William Stockard, William Sharpe, and A.W. Boon, of states not named.

The last early town to be established in this community was Pleasant View, which stood at about 2:00 in relation to present day Lawson. It was founded on a part of lands entered by John J. Moore, in 1853. He sold the entire parcel to John P. Holman the next year and Holman in turn sold it to John Joiner. In 1856, William C. Hyder bought the tract and then on June 15, 1859, sold twenty acres of it to Isaac Berry, a German, for $200. Immediately, Berry laid out a townsite on that narrow, fair lying, south sloping acreage above east flowing Coon Branch. He named it Pleasant View because of the seemly outlook it commanded, there at the northeast edge of the prairie.