Robsart began in 1910, when the Canadian Pacific Railway bought a quarter section of land in southwest Saskatchewan and gave it the name Robsart, after Amy Robsart in Sir Walter Scott's novel Kenilworth. Three years later the land was bought by Henry Abbott, who led the first settlers to the new community. A general store and a feed mill were among the first businesses, and about 30 more soon followed, including a dentist, a jeweller and a surgeon.
The village was incorporated in 1912, and when the CPR finished its Stirling-Weyburn line, a boom followed. New hotels, cafés, churches, livery barns, a school, banks and grain elevators opened almost weekly, and a public hospital opened in 1917. Within ten years Robsart had around 350 residents, a town hall, a mayor and council, and more than 50 businesses. One postcard of the town carried the motto "A town with a bright future."
The good years faded in the late 1920s. A grain elevator fire in 1929 was followed a year later by another blaze that wiped out a large part of the business core. The Great Depression, with its droughts, low grain prices and poor crops, brought more closures, and many merchants left. In the 1980s locals and nearby farmers renovated the community hall, but most remaining businesses and homes were boarded up, and the two elevators came down in 2000. The village was dissolved on January 1, 2002, and is now part of the RM of Reno No. 51.
Today the old hospital still stands, as do the community hall and the Beaver Lumber storefront on Main Street. Robsart Art Works shows Saskatchewan artists, and the Vidora Cafe was moved here from the former town of Vidora. In the early 1990s, current and former residents put together a community history book, Our Side of The Hills.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Robsart, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.