Strongfield's story begins in 1903, during the great wave of settlement across the Canadian prairies. The land had first been surveyed in the summer of 1883 by J.A. Maddock and his crew. Later, the Saskatchewan Valley Land Company, formed by Col. Davidson and A.D. McRae, bought huge tracts and recruited more than two thousand agents to sell farmland between Saskatoon and Regina.
One of those agents, George Armstrong of Markdale, Ontario, helped draw settlers from his home area, and over a third of the early residents came from the Markdale-Meaford district. Finnish settlers from the Dakotas took homesteads along the South Saskatchewan River, though most later moved to the west side of the river. A third group came from the central United States, many of them of Norwegian descent, encouraged by Lutheran clergyman Knute B. Birkeland, founder of Hanley. Later, relatives of these pioneers came directly from Norway.
Strongfield became a village on May 3, 1912, and served as the economic and social hub for the growing district. It once had a school, post office, car and farm equipment dealers, two Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevators, and a number of restaurants and shops. Unusually for a Saskatchewan village, it boomed for about ten years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Gardiner Dam was built some 20 km to the west.
Today the school is gone and most businesses have closed. The village still has hockey and curling rinks, an Elks lodge, a café and post office, a small United Church, and a cenotaph honouring its fallen soldiers of both World Wars.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Strongfield” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.