History

In 1837 soldiers disbanded from the British German Legion which had fought during the Sixth Frontier War (1835) settled on the forest-covered slopes of the Kologha Mountains. They founded a town named after their commander, General Richard von Stutterheim.

Six kilometres south of Stutterheim is a turn-of to the grave of Sandile, warrior chief of the Gaikas, who was killed in June 1878 in the Ninth Frontier War. North of Stutterheim is the Bethel Mission, built in 1865 on the site of the first Berlin mission station in the eastern Cape. It was founded in 1837 by the Reverend Jacob Ludwig Dohne of the Berlin Missionary Society. The mission station was sacked in the Seventh Frontier War, rebuilt by the Reverend Albert Kropf and again burnt down in 1850. Kropf, who compiled the first Xhosa-English dictionary and was chief translator for the Xhosa Bible, was a doughty man, though, and started all over yet again. Some of the Germans veterans of the Crimean War who settled in the eastern Cape in 1857 made their homes around Fort Dohne, which had been established near the mission station.