Sir Sanford Fleming named Exshaw after his son-in-law, E. William Exshaw (15 February 1866, Bordeaux – 16 March 1927; of Anglo-Irish descent; and sailing Olympic gold medalist at the Paris 1900 Summer Olympics), who with Fleming helped establish the Western Canada Cement and Coal Company.

Robert D. Hassan, an American mechanical engineer, was hired in 1906 to build a mill in Exshaw, Alberta for the Western Canada Cement and Coal Company.

During the summers Lucille ran the Bowfort Service Station and tea room nine miles (14 km) west of Exshaw, at 'The Gap'.

In the 1970s, a portion of Exshaw was demolished – 47 homes, a church, and a school – to make way for expansion of the cement plant.

[4] East of Exshaw are smaller company town communities of Kananaskis (lime plant), which is not the recreational area of the same name, and Seebe (power dam), which is now closed but proposed for future residential redevelopment.

In 1958, Alan McGugan et al., identified a new species of the pelecypod Megalodon in a river cliff of Exshaw Creek and gave the new specific name M. banffensis, for the proximity of the Banff area.

The Jura Creek valley is known to provide a good introduction to some Front Range geology, with the exposed formations including the Palliser (Devonian), Exshaw and Banff (Mississippian).

Duncan MacGillivray, with explorer David Thompson on his survey of the Canadian Rockies, first encountered a bighorn sheep, near Exshaw, on 30 November 1800, which led to the specimens collected and subsequent scientific naming.

Baymag had its 40th anniversary in 2022; it had one year earlier reached a milestone of 150,000 metric tonnes per annum capacity.

8, which also includes the hamlets of Benchlands, Dead Man's Flats, Harvie Heights and Lac des Arcs, as well as rural ranchland west of Cochrane.