The Hanover citizens struggle to find jobs and go to De Aar, Richmond and Colesberg for grocery shopping.

Historic figures were at the centre of life here, people like Olive Schreiner, author and women's rights champion, and the tempestuous Rev.

The town's chief constable was the grandson of Lord Charles Somerset, the magistrate's clerk a son of Charles John Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff, well-known churchman and devotional writer of his day, and the local doctor was the son of a former Solicitor-General of Jamaica.

Well-known people of today hailing from Hanover includes Zwelinzima Vavi, the General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

South African author and women's rights pioneer, Olive Schreiner, and husband Cron lived in Hanover from 1900 to 1907 in a typical small iron-roofed Karoo cottage with a "stoep".

The farm was originally granted to W. L. Pretorius in November 1841, but things did not go all that well with him and by February the following year he sold to Jan J. Smook.

Frederick von Malditz later acquired the property and later still Petrus J. Botha, who sold it to Gert Johannes Wilhelm Gouws, the grandson of Sterren Gauche, a German who had come to Africa in search of his fortune.

Farmers had to undertake long and arduous journeys to Graaff-Reinet for church, communion or nagmaal services, marriages and baptisms.

At Gous's request it was agreed to name the village Hanover as his grandfather had come from that city in Lower Saxony, Germany.

District boundaries were firmly established by January 1859, the same year the first church, a typical tiny cruciform thatched-roofed building, was completed.

When the first erven were sold, prospective residents were instructed to build directly on and parallel to the edge of the road with gardens at the back.

Hanover was declared a magisterial district on 13 November 1876, and Charles Richard Beere was appointed magistrate.

It houses a small cultural history museum, and on display are old bottles, clothes, glassware, kitchen utensils and implements.

In the cemetery on the outskirts of town a pyramid of stone marks the grave of three young men executed during the Anglo-Boer War.

After the war General Malan joined Olive and Cron Schreiner in a lengthy campaign to have the names of the three cleared.