Love began as a railway siding. The Canadian Pacific Railway pushed its tracks through the area in 1929, building sidings as it went north and west from Nipawin through White Fox, Love and Garrick to Choiceland. The siding at Love was used to load firewood, pulp, lumber and other forest products, and later farm and dairy goods. It was first known as Love Siding, and the name came from Tom Love, the conductor of the first train to pass through.
Settlement started in 1934, when Bill Sears built a general store with help from Emery Long. A post office opened in the store in 1935, with Sears as postmaster. Lumber mills drew millworkers and lumberjacks, who built homes wherever there was room, since no townsite had been surveyed. In 1939 the homeowners formed the Love Development Company and bid $1,200 for a 35-acre block of provincial land, which was surveyed into lots. Love became a village on June 2, 1945.
More mills opened, and the village reached a peak of about 250 people by the 1950s, by which time the local timber was running low and farming had grown. At its busiest it had two general stores, a hotel with a beer parlour, a pool hall, cafes, an insurance office and gas stations. A grain elevator went up in 1947 but was later torn down, like most small elevators. Rail service ended around 2002, and in 2008 local business people and investors bought the Nipawin to Choiceland tracks, now run as the Torch River Rail.
Today Love is known for its name and its postmark, a teddy bear holding a heart. People around the world send wedding invitations to the Love post office to be stamped before they are mailed on. Connie Kaldor wrote a song about the village, the title track of her 2014 album Love Sask.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Love, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.