Reivilo is a town

Town

A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while...

 situated 100 km southwest of Vryburg on the Ghaap Plateau in North West Province of South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

. Lead

Lead

Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...

 and Zinc

Zinc

Zinc , or spelter , is a metallic chemical element; it has the symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is the first element in group 12 of the periodic table. Zinc is, in some respects, chemically similar to magnesium, because its ion is of similar size and its only common oxidation state is +2...

 mining used to take place in the district.

History

The town was established in 1883 and at first named Cathcart West (to distinguish it from Cathcart, Eastern Cape

Cathcart, Eastern Cape

Cathcart is a town in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, named after Sir George Cathcart. Sir George Cathcart was governor of the Cape of Good Hope 1852-1853.The town is situated on the N6, just north of Stutterheim on route to Queenstown...

). The name was then changed in 1890 to Klein Boetsap, and then finally it was renamed after Rev AJ Olivier (Olivier reversed is Reivilo).

Economy

Reivilo is a traditional farming communinity. The main farming business is cattle, and this is dictated by the geology of the area, because there is not enough soil for agriculture. Bedrock comes right to surface, the bedrock being an ancient and hard dolomite, with extraordinary stromatolitic features, representing life forms more than 2 billion years old. There was a successful cheese factory in Reivilo for many years.

In the very early 1980s Shell South Africa Pty Ltd

Royal Dutch Shell

Royal Dutch Shell plc , commonly known as Shell, is a global oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the fifth-largest company in the world according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine and one of the six...

 (the oil company) developed a lead and zinc mine very near Reivilo called Pering. It operated successfully for about 18 years and then closed down. Shell mined about 18 million tonnes of ore, containing perhaps 750,000 tonnes of zinc and lead metal from the Pering Mine in that time. The mine is now closed. At the present time there is no mining taking place anywhere near Reivilo.

The town today includes the Reivilo golf course to the north of the town, and a small landing strip to the north-west.