Formerly named West Waterloo, it was an original station on the Columbia and Western Railway opened in 1897. Called Kinnaird by 1912,[1] a popular theory indicates this to be Arthur Kinnaird, 11th Lord Kinnaird, the first superstar of association football and President of the Football Association.[2] This could align with a suggestion that a Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) official provided the name in honour of a place in Scotland.[3]
An alternative theory proposes the name was that of an early settler, perhaps a variation of the person's actual name. One possibility is a CP employee with a name such as Kinney, whose yard bordered the railway siding, giving rise to a "Kinney yard" that developed into Kinnaird. Alfred Joseph Kinney and Frank Kinert were early CP employees listed in the Castegar directory. Furthermore, Kinert is a spelling variant of Kinnaird and the Kinert clan lived in the barony of Kinnaird. Being an obscure railway point at the time, no theory of the name origin appears more plausible than another.[3]