Sargodha was founded in 1903 as the headquarters of the Lower Jhelum Colony, one of nine canal colonies cut into the bar country between the rivers of western Punjab between 1885 and 1940. Before the canals the bar was grazing land held by pastoral communities. After them it carried some of the highest-yielding wheat land in Asia.
The colonies were settled by allotment. Peasant grants went largely to cultivators from the central districts, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Hoshiarpur, on conditions of residence and cultivation. Sargodha's Lower Jhelum Colony was laid out with a particular purpose, the breeding of army horses and mules, and grants there carried an obligation to keep brood mares.
Villages in the colonies were numbered rather than named. Chak numbers are still the address in that part of Pakistan and are still how displaced families in Indian Punjab name where they came from.
The Colonisation of Government Lands Bill of 1906 proposed to tighten the conditions on the grants so far that colonists organised against it. That agitation produced the song Pagri Sambhal Jatta and made Ajit Singh, uncle of Bhagat Singh, a name across the province. The Viceroy, Lord Minto, vetoed the bill in May 1907.
The families settled at Sargodha and across the bar in the years after 1902 left in 1947. Most of the settled land had been in the family for one or two generations.
The district was made out of the Lower Jhelum Colony, settled from the 1900s, and its villages are numbered chaks like the rest of the colony country.
It was a horse breeding tract by design. Allotments in parts of it carried an obligation to breed remounts for the army, which is one of the odder conditions ever attached to a land grant.
It is now known for its citrus. The colony's whole purpose, to convert bar grazing land into settled agriculture and army recruitment, was achieved inside one generation.