Warrenton is an agricultural town with a population of 25,100 situated in the Vaalharts Irrigation Scheme

Vaalharts Irrigation Scheme

Vaalharts Irrigation Scheme is one of the largest irrigation schemes in the world covering 369.50 square kilometres in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Water from a diversion weir in the Vaal River, near Warrenton, flows through an 812 km long network of canals, watering 1,250 farms of...

 on the banks of the Vaal River

Vaal River

The Vaal River is the largest tributary of the Orange River in South Africa. The river has its source in the Drakensberg mountains in Mpumalanga, east of Johannesburg and about 30 km north of Ermelo and only about 240 km from the Indian Ocean. It then flows westwards to its conjunction...

 in the Northern Cape 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...

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In 1880, a syndicate bought the western portion of the farm Grasbult to irrigate the fertile land and produce vegetable

Vegetable

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....

s for the diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

 fields. The town which grew here was named after Sir Charles Warren

Charles Warren

General Sir Charles Warren, GCMG, KCB, FRS was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of Temple Mount...

. Diamonds were discovered here in 1888 and mining continued to 1926.