Yellow Grass takes its name from the yellow prairie grass that surrounds the area. The town site was surveyed in 1882, and the community began to take shape shortly after the Canadian Pacific Railway's Soo Line was completed in 1893. It became an incorporated village in 1903 and a town on February 15, 1906. The first town council met that March, with J.H. Allen elected the first mayor in a hotly contested race.
The railway was the lifeblood of the early town. A first boom began in 1899, when most of the original town infrastructure was put in place, and a second, much bigger one followed the First World War and lasted until the late 1920s, when Yellow Grass served as the trading centre for the region. Townspeople were quick to build services: a school district in 1900, a cemetery in 1905, a volunteer fire department in 1906, and the Yellow Grass Rural Telephone Company in 1908, a pioneer in bringing telephones to southern Saskatchewan. The town's first power plant followed in 1912.
Highway 39 and easier access to larger centres began to draw business away, and the Great Depression and crop failures took their toll. Farming recovered after the Second World War with record crops. The town sent 42 men overseas in the First World War and 167 residents in the Second, and in 1971 the Legion set aside the Field of Vanquished in the cemetery to honour the war dead.
Today Yellow Grass is an agricultural town, and many families descend from the original pioneers. It is also remembered for hitting 45 °C on July 5, 1937, then a Canadian record, and for its curling rink that played in the very first Brier. Two brothers from town, Peter and Nolan Schaefer, went on to the NHL.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Yellow Grass” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.