Charlestown is a small town situated at the top of

Laing's Nek Laing's Nek, or Lang's Nek is a pass through the Drakensberg mountain range, South Africa, immediately north of Majuba, at at an elevation of 5400 to . It is the lowest part of a ridge which slopes from Majuba to the Buffalo River, and before ...

pass in KwaZulu-Natal,

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

between

Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to: *Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England *Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England *Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...

and

Volksrust Volksrust is a town in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa near the KwaZulu-Natal provincial border, some 240 km southeast of Johannesburg, 53 km north of Newcastle and 80 km southeast of Standerton. History The town was la ...

. It started out as an important

railway Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a pre ...

station and customs post between Natal and

Transvaal Transvaal is a historical geographic term associated with land north of (''i.e.'', beyond) the Vaal River in South Africa. A number of states and administrative divisions have carried the name Transvaal. * South African Republic (1856–1902; af, ...

in 1891 until the

Union of South Africa The Union of South Africa ( nl, Unie van Zuid-Afrika; af, Unie van Suid-Afrika; ) was the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into existence on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the Cape, Natal, Tran ...

came into being in 1910, and customs tariffs were abolished. It is named after Sir Charles Mitchell, governor of Natal. In 1927 the town was the site of one of South Africa's first mass-shooting instances when local farmer Stephanus Swart shot and killed 8 people. It became a dormitory suburb of

, just across the border in the

, and many black people bought freehold land in the town. During the 1960s, however, the

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

policy of the government led to ''most'' of the black inhabitants being forcibly removed to Madadeni, near Newcastle, and Charlestown became a ghost town.

References

Populated places in the Newcastle Local Municipality {{KwaZuluNatal-geo-stub