Lafleche began in 1905 as the village of Buffalo Head, which formed about a mile and a half east of today's townsite as settlers arrived. The name was later changed to honour Louis-François Richer Laflèche. By March 1912 the hamlet had a bank, two stores and blacksmith shops.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway came through in 1913 it missed the hamlet, so the houses were moved to the new site and a village with wide streets and avenues quickly took shape. Lafleche was incorporated as a village that same year, and by 1915 it had lumber yards, grain elevators, a drug store and a growing list of shops. The Catholic church, begun in 1913, and the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who arrived in 1915 and opened a convent school, helped the community grow. St. Radegonde Roman Catholic Church, built in 1922, is now a listed heritage property.
The 1930s were hard. After eight straight crop failures in 1937, local people started the province's first rural community credit union, chartered on April 19, 1938. Dr. Louis-Emile Belcourt served the area as a pioneer doctor for thirty-two years, and Lafleche took over a hospital in 1944.
Lafleche became a town in 1953, with C.P. Dewulf as its first mayor. Water and sewer service arrived in the 1950s, the streets were paved in 1969, and the town celebrated its centennial in 2013.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Lafleche, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.