Oudtshoorn started out as a small village named in honour of Geesje Ernestina Johanna van Oudtshoorn, wife of the first civil commissioner for George.
By the 1860s ostriches, which live in the wild in Africa, were being raised under the ideal conditions of the Oudtshoorn Valley.
The quirky Victorian fashion for large feathers had turned the ostriches into a source of serious wealth, and by the 1880s hundreds of thousands of kilograms of feathers were being esported.
On the back on this boom, the labourers drew the shortest straw of all - mostly coloured descendants of the Outeniqua and Attaqua Khoikhoi and trekboers, who received derisory wages supplemented by rations of food, wine, spirits and tobacco.
In the early twentieth century, the most successful farmers and traders built themselves feather palaces, ostentatious sandstone Edwardian buildings that have become the defining feature of Oudtshoorn.
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