History
The fortunes of Middelpos were built on the trading store established by Daniel Tomlinson after purchasing a portion of the farm Stinkkuil from a local farmer in 1860. After his death, the Sher family purchased the trading store, building it into a successful enterprise servicing the needs of the farming community a far afield as the Tankwa Karoo, Sutherland, Calvinia and Williston.
The Sher family, of Jewish Lithuanian extraction, were part of a widely dispersed community of Jewish traders that played a very important role in establishing commercial enterprises in many remote Karoo towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most famous family member is Sir Anthony Sher KBE, who was born in Cape Town in 1949 and is a renowned Shakespearean actor, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and author of the book Middelpost.