The building is the oldest existing dwelling in the immediate vicinity of Rustenburg. Designed in a neo-classical idiom, it was erected for William Robertson some time before 1874, when it was acquired by August Schoch. After the South African War, the farm Boschdal was used as a centre for the repatriation of displaced Dutch families. It was declared a National Monument under old NMC legislation on 27 December 1985.
The Schoch Family Papers consist of 219 items covering the period 1868 - 1940 and include diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, personal documents, press clippings, maps, printed items and photographs. They were deposited in the library in 1974 by a family descendant, Mr. H.E. van Santen, Johannesburg.
While the greatest part of the papers relates to Herman Eugene Schoch (1862- 1947), Surveyor General of the Transvaal, there are manuscripts pertaining to his father Wilhelm August Schoch, a Swiss immigrant to South Africa. and the author of a book entitled 34 Jahre Im Lande der Buren, published by Brieg, Kubisch, 1910. Both this book and his Mss of reminiscences, written mainly for his children, supply interesting information on South Africa in general and the Transvaal in particular during the second half of the 19th century. There are also family histories giving the genealogy of the Schoch family in Europe.
In addition there is an account by H.E. Schoch's sister-in-law Celestine du Plessis, of life in Rustenburg during the South African War, 1899-1900 when the town changed hands several times.
H.E. Schoch's papers relate to the South African War 1899-1902 and in particular to the siege of Mafeking. Also of considerable value, are his papers on the Angola-South West Africa Boundary Commission, of which he was a member. In his notebooks of reminiscences he comments on personalities he met such as Presidents Burgers and Kruger, Generals de la Rey and Smuts, Sir L.S. Jameson and Sir Arnold Theiler and of events like the Jameson Raid, the Braamfontein dynamite explosion and the siege of Mafeking during the war with the Pondomisi. There are also descriptions of native customs in the Transvaal and of bushman paintings and customs in the Cape of Good Hope and South West Africa.
As the papers arrived in no particular order, they have been rearranged, according to archival type with the exception of the papers relating to the Angola-South West Africa Boundary Commission, which have been grouped together.
