Beaufort West Municipality
The oldest municipality in South Africa
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- Created on Sunday, 30 October 2011 06:41
The 1740’s saw the settlement at the Cape extending rapidly in an easterly direction and the first stock farms were established in the area later to be known as the districts of Suterhland and Fraserburg. By about 1750 stock farmers had moved towards the Koup and the Nieuveld and established farms in what is now the district of Beaufort West. A few years later (1760) the loan-farm Hooyvlakte – on which the town Beaufort was to be laid out later – was issued. The naturalist and traveller, Lichtenstein, says that when he visited this farm of Commandant Abraham de Klerk in 1804 he found that the nearest neighbour was 100 kilometres away. By 1800 there were already several farmers who owned stock farms to the north of the Nuweveldberge.