Ruthilda sits about 30 kilometres southwest of Biggar, a short way south of Highway 51. The first homesteaders came into the district as early as 1905, among them Charles Fraser, Harry Hobbs, James Bowden, the Goldie brothers, John Nyquist and his sons, and Alex Scott. In 1910 a site for a station and townsite was surveyed, and the place took its name from Ruth and Hilda, the daughters of early settler H. Alex Goodwin.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway graded the line in 1911, laid rails in 1912 and built the Ruthilda station. A post office opened on November 1, 1912, and other businesses soon followed. The school was built in 1914, the same year two grain elevators went up. Ruthilda was incorporated as a village on February 3, 1921, and the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool added a third elevator a couple of years later. In 1925 this small community fielded one of the province's most formidable baseball teams. The United Church was built in 1928, giving worshippers who had met in homes, the lumberyard, the school and the community hall a place of their own. Fires swept through in 1926, 1936, 1951 and 1959.
The population peaked at 114 in 1931. An elevator came down in 1947, the school closed in 1964 and its children were bused to Plenty, and the rail line was abandoned in the mid-1980s. No elevators remain. The village dissolved into the RM of Grandview No. 349 on December 31, 2013. Nearby, the Spring Water Hutterite Colony was founded in 1982 as a division of the Valley View Colony in Linden, Alberta.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Ruthilda, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.