Robert Ingersoll Mayer (circa 1881-1937), a civil engineer for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad who hailed originally from Indianapolis, moved to Alberta with his wife, Emma, in 1908. They homesteaded along the Little Paddle River northwest of Edmonton and accepted the invitation of Peter Gunn, Member of the Legislative Assembley (and for whom the hamlet of Gunn was named), to operate the post office. Gunn first proposed the name Mayerville for the post office, and when that was rejected he changed it to Mayerthorpe, adding a suffix understood to mean village or hamlet (or else the name of a local teacher). With the approach of the Canadian Northern Railway in 1919, settler Leo Oscar Crockett (circa 1884-1965), a U.S. navy veteran, subdivided and promoted the townsite of Little Paddle about five kilometres east of the Mayers' post office. Crockett resisted the call to rename the settlement "Crockett," and when the Mayers' post office closed in 1921 and a new one opened in the townsite, Little Paddle became Mayerthorpe. Bob Mayer moved to Edmonton in 1922 and worked there as a railway bridgeman until his death. Crockett remained in Mayerthorpe, where his namesake son later became mayor. Both Mayer and Crockett are buried in Edmonton. Mayerthorpe was incorporated as a village in 1927 and as a town in 1961.