The town was named after the village of Craigellachie on the River Spey in Scotland, the ancestral home of Sir George Stephen, the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The town is most famous for being the site of the "last spike" of the CPR, driven by Sir Donald Smith, a director of the CPR, on November 7, 1885. It is the Canadian equivalent of Promontory Point in the United States.