Aberdeen in the Karoo only has one tarred road, the rest are gravel. In Stockenstroom Street you'll find Pagel House, a guesthouse owned by Lyn Dugmore. Lyn, an antiques collector, has decorated the house in its original Victorian style, a perfect fit for her antiques. She has travelled and worked as a nurse in Switzerland for many years before settling in the Karoo. Pagel House was named after its famous owner Wilhelm Pagel, who was the Pagel’s Circus master and strongman.
Aberdeen used to be a watering point for horses and was visited by Voortrekkers on their way inland. The town was built on a natural water reservoir, with springs on the nearby farms. A stone post office was built in Aberdeen in 1898, by accident as it was intended for Grahamstown. The builders arrived in Aberdeen and, being unfamiliar with the area, believed they were in Grahamstown and so set to work. Because of their mistake they weren’t paid a cent for their efforts. Aberdeen still has its first home near the town centre. The Homestead was built in 1820 on the farm Brakkefontein and later became Aberdeen. Brakkefontein was renamed in 1855 after Aberdeen in Scotland, the birthplace of Reverend Andrew Murray, the Dutch Reformed minister in Graaff-Reinet at the time. The Homestead still has its original yellowwood floor and oxblood-stained oregon ceilings and is now a guesthouse owned by Clyde and Desné Cole, who settled in Aberdeen after sailing the Caribbean.
Resident Wendy van Schalkwyk is writing a book about the town, which is rich in Anglo-Boer war legends. Carel van Heerden, a Boer rebel, was shot and killed in front of the Dutch Reformed Church, while British soldier Captain Lawrence Oats was shot in the leg and nursed in the town.
The Dutch Reformed Church has a 51.2m-high steeple. A maintenance lift called Tarantula, takes tourists up the church tower. The Tarantula was born when the congregation restored the tower. The tower was built with raw stone that disintegrates as the paint peels off. It was too expensive to hire facades to paint and restore the tower, due to its immense height, so a long term sustainable solution was looked into. After successful fund raising, Retief van Rensburg, a farmer and air drill contractor, of the Beaufort West district, took three months to design, build the Tarantula and install it at the church. The name Tarantula refers to the eight-legged steel structure installed at the base of the steeple. On its test run the Tarantula pulled up 14 passengers and 2 bakkies into the air. It would have cost the church R70 000 to erect facades and have the tower painted once. Now the church members do maintenance work themselves on a continual basis and receive money from tourists riding up the tower.
The church was built in different stages and the tower, its latest addition, was completed in 1907. In the church yard, an olive tree grows which was cultivated from a sprout a previous minister picked in the garden of Gethsemane. Every year the olives are harvested, pickled and sold at an auction. Inside the church, wool portraits of Bible history from the creation to the judgement day, line the walls.