Balgonie takes its name from Balgonie Castle in Scotland. The first Canadian Pacific Railway train rolled through the area in 1882, and a post office opened in 1883. The next year, Sir John Lister Kaye set up a model farm near the railway, and the town sat at the easternmost edge of the old 76 Ranch lands.
A school was built in 1891. Balgonie was incorporated as a village in 1903 and became a town in 1907.
One of its best-known residents was William Wallace Gibson (1876–1965), who created the first Canadian-built airplane and flew it successfully in Victoria in 1910. His story was told in the National Film Board of Canada's 1991 stop-motion animated short The Balgonie Birdman, directed by Brian Duchscherer.
The town's population dropped sharply in the 1930s and 1940s, but the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in the late 1950s brought new growth. Today Balgonie sits about 25 kilometres east of Regina, where several highways meet the Trans-Canada, and it has an outdoor pool, an ice arena and Greenall School.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Balgonie” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.