Kathryn, a typical prairie town, emerged with railroad construction after pioneers had settled the area in the late 1870s. The arrival of a Northern Pacific Railroad line in 1900 and the establishment of a cooperative grain elevator made the town an important local place, and a month later Runck arrived with a railcar of lumber as construction of the Runck Brothers Mercantile and the Northern Pacific Depot began. Named for a railroad executive's daughter, Kathryn was one of several local stops named for women on "The Ladies' Line," and local merchant John Runck quickly platted a townsite near the railroad route on September 15, 1900. Grain elevators, once dominant features of the Midwestern skyline, stood at the financial center of prairie life at the dawn of the 20th century, and their ownership often reflected local politics. Some were controlled by railroad and milling interests, while others, including the Kathryn Farmers' Mutual Elevator around 1905, were built by local cooperatives to secure fair grain prices. Kathryn's original wood elevator burned in 1916 and was rebuilt with ten-inch-thick concrete walls. Its cylindrical concrete grain elevator, built that year after the fire, was a patented design and the first of its kind constructed in the United States. In its early operation, horse-drawn wagons entered receiving bays and dumped grain into floor grates, and bucket conveyors carried the grain to the top to fill storage bins. Despite years of population decline, Kathryn has retained its pioneer settlement character, and many older buildings have remained, including structures associated with stores, a hotel, a pool hall, a meat market, and the Kathryn Recorder, one of the town's two newspapers, published from 1908 to 1942.