Did You Know?
The grave of the original owner of the farm Witplaas, where the town of De Aar was later established, is located in De Aar, Northern Cape. The farm Witplaas was originally granted to a settler in the early 19th century, and the grave dates to 1839, marking the burial of the farm's first owner. De Aar itself was founded in 1903 as a railway junction on the line between Cape Town and Kimberley, but the area had been inhabited by Khoisan and later by European farmers since the 18th century. The grave is a tangible link to the pre-railway era of the region, when the Karoo landscape was dominated by sheep farming and isolated homesteads. However, specific details about the individual buried there are not widely recorded in public historical sources.
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