The Dewsbury Rams were formed as a rugby football club thanks to a meeting amongst friends at the Little Saddle Inn in 1875. The team was established immediately as the Dewsbury Athletic and Football Club (the Rams name came later) with a respectable 40 members. In 1875 the first major game for the club took place at the Heckmondwike Church Society ground and they lost by one goal, six tries and eight touch downs to nothing. In 1880 the Yorkshire Cup semi-final played by Dewsbury Rams against Wakefield Trinity drew a massive 16,000 supporters to the Crown Flatt ground which was claimed to be the largest amount of people assembled in one place in Yorkshire at the time. The team went on to continued success in the Yorkshire Challenge Cup beating Huddersfield, Bradford and Halifax before siezing victory from Wakefield in the final game.

In 1898 a meeting took place at the Black Bull public house to discuss the possibility of forming a new Northern Union club. The teams local rivals, Batley Bulldogs helped Dewsbury Rams gain election into the new Northern Union, they supported their rivals bid and the rest, as they say, is history. In 1898 the Dewsbury Rams travelled to Normanton for a Nothern Union club match and were beaten 3-16. The next Saturday they were able to play their first home game against Kinsley and won by 13-5, and during the rest of the season the team played in Yorkshire No. 2 Competition. In 1902 the Lancashire and Yorkshire Leagues were combined to form a second division, the Dewsbury Rams were one of the teams to join this division. The Dewsbury Rams first major success came in 1912 when they beat rivals Oldham 8-5 in the Challenge Cup final at Headingley.

After World War II the Dewsbury Rams saw varied amounts of successes. In 1972 Maurice Bamford arrived at the Dewsbury Rams as the teams new coach. The teams only championship title came in the 1972 to 1973 season when they beat Leeds in the play off final at Bradford's Odsal Stadium 22-13. The team managed to finish 8th in the league but the title was to be decided via a long series of play offs in which the Dewsbury Rams defeated Oldham, Featherstone and Warrington on their way to victory. In 1988 the Dewsbury Rams suffered vandalism at the hands of three youths who set fire to the historic wooden stand that was erected in 1914. The stand was in fantastic condition, having just been refurbished to bring it up to modern safety standards to apply with health and safety laws, unfortunately the fire meant tha the Dewsbury Rams also lost all of the momentos and things they had gathered over the past 113 years of history including records and memorabilia. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes the club built a new state of the art stadium at Owl Lane and adopted the Rams suffix to the previous Dewsbury title in 1996.

The Dewsbury Rams have enjoyed a lot of success over recent years, finishing top of the Northern Ford Premiership for two seasons in 1999 and 2000, as well as going on to scoop the Grand Final and Trans Pennine Cup in 2000. The Dewsbury Rams were unfortunately denied access to the Super League due to an insufficient stadium capacity which led the team to propose ground sharing with Sheffield Eagles. This request was rejected by the RFL, and the teams luck continued to fall when they were relegated to the 3rd tier for the first time in ten years. In the 2005 season the Dewsbury Rams fell just short of earning promotion into National League 2 loosing to York City Knights and Sheffield Eagles, and the team went on to make the National Leage 1 qualifying final, however a defeat at the hands of the Batley Bulldogs meant that they were resigned to the second division for 2006. 2007 saw the Dewsbury Rams play in National Leage 1 for the first time and perform remarkably well finishing a respectable 7th.