Nokomis began in 1904, when the area opened to homesteading in what was then the Northwest Territories. By 1906 Florence Mary Halstead had set up a post office on the family farm and named it Nokomis, after a character in Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha. When the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway arrived, the townsite, first called Junction City in the hope that it would become the largest city in Western Canada, asked to have the post office moved into town. Halstead agreed on the condition that the town take her post office's name, and in 1908 it became Nokomis.
Growth came quickly. Two banks opened in 1907, and the first classes were held in a hall above one of them. In 1908 carloads of lumber, hardware and carpenters arrived, almost every train brought new settlers, and the town built its first five street lights, a four-room brick school, the Nokomis Times building and the railway station. A prefabricated Bank of Commerce building went up on Main Street in 1910. In 1921 the Great Nokomis Fire destroyed several businesses and homes on Main Street.
Coal was found southeast of town in 1912, and more mines followed. After the Second World War, oil took over: the first well was drilled in 1947 in the shallow Hatfield Basin, and a record-setting horizontal well followed in 1988.
The old railway station is now part of the Nokomis District Museum, which opened in 1980. The town also has its Centennial Hall, built in 1967, and a new fire hall completed in 2016. The North Star Range, a long-range rifle range east of town, has been run by the Saskatchewan Provincial Rifle Association since 1998.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Nokomis, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.