Before settlers arrived, the land around Southey was home to First Nations people. As the prairies opened for settlement in the late 1880s and 1890s, Europeans and Americans followed the river valleys and then the westward push of the railway. The first settlers near Southey were ranchers living north and south of the present townsite.
One of them, H.B. Chandler, filed on land on the south side of town in 1903. When the railway came through, he asked that the site be named Southey, after Robert Southey, one of his favourite English poets.
Between 1905 and 1912 the community filled in quickly, with the first stores, a school, banks, elevators, a barber shop, hardware and implement dealers, restaurants, a lumber yard, a telephone system, sidewalks and fire brigades. Southey was incorporated in 1907–08. Streets were later named for other British writers and poets, so you can travel down Keats, Browning, Burns, Byron, Coleridge, Frost, Kipling and Milton.
Southey marked its 80th anniversary in 1988 and its 100th in 2008. Today it has a curling rink, a water spray park, and an ice rink at the Southey Communiplex, and Robert Southey School serves students from kindergarten through Grade 12.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Southey, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.