Byron was settled by a group of Mormon pioneers on May 22, 1900. The town was named in honor of their spiritual leader, Byron Sessions, a man who was also the General Manager of the Sidon Canal Construction Company. It was irrigation water from the canal they constructed that turned this desolate area of greasewood, prickly pear cactus and scrub sagebrush into the fertile farmland it is today.

The town of Byron was incorporated on June 7, 1910 and still bears testimony to the hard work and dedication of those early settlers. Today, Byron is surrounded by thousands of acres of irrigated farmlands and vast oil fields.

The original Mormon settlement in this area was at Burlington, in 1897. As the LDS Church was taking a serious interest in colonizing in the area, Buffalo Bill Cody and some of his partners were looking for some funding to jumpstart their settlement at Cody. Wyoming Governor DeForest Richards brokered a transaction in which some of Cody's water rights were transferred to the state, and the state then transferred them to the Big Horn Colonization Company (which was controlled by the LDS Church). 450 Mormon settlers came to the area and settled at Byron and Cowley. At first they were working on the Sidon Canal exclusively, but that project was horribly underfunded. Then the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad started to build into the area and needed workers. So half the settlers continued working on the canal and half went to work for the railroad. It took them 2 years but they eventually dug the 37-mile-long Sidon Canal and radically changed their lives for the better.