From Over Den Berg to Stone River: A History of the Old Hotel

Few buildings in McGregor have worn as many names, or passed through as many hands, as the two-storey building on Voortrekker Road that today houses Stone River. Over more than a century it has been a private home, a hotel, a restaurant, a liquor store and a corner shop — sometimes several of these at once — and its story is really the story of the village itself, told through one building’s changing fortunes.

A Victorian Villa Becomes a Hotel

The building’s core is thought to date to around 1890, when it was built as a single-storey Victorian house on the same plan as the Lion House further down Voortrekker Street — a typical layout of two stoepkamers bookending a timber-and-iron veranda. Lion House still stands much as it would have looked then, with its quoined corners and windows and a timber-panelled front door with sidelights, offering a good sense of what this building looked like in its earliest years.

That changed around 1936, when the property’s owner at the time, Mr Barry, added a full upper floor, transforming the modest villa into a proper hotel. The new floor was built in the Cape Dutch Revival style, with gables projecting out over the original stoepkamers and a concrete balcony — supported on precast Doric columns — replacing the old Victorian veranda. Even so, traces of the original house survived the upgrade: the stoepkamers are still there, along with their decorative corner quoining and the front door and sidelights that once matched Lion House’s.

The Barry Years

The hotel remained in the Barry family for some time after that. In 1948, a sixteen-year-old Ina Barry arrived in McGregor from Villiersdorp to take up the post of postmistress, responsible for both the post office and the telephone exchange. She lodged in a room at the hotel when she first arrived, and in 1962 married Fritz Barry. The couple went on to live in a house next to the shop Shiprah on Voortrekker Road, which the family still runs today — Tannie Ina remains a much-loved figure in the village.

Changing Hands

At some point the hotel passed out of the Barry family and into the hands of a lawyer based in Bonnievale. By 1988 it was being run by Dawn Meerholz, though she gave it up after about a year. Around the same time, the bar was kept by an elderly, taciturn man known simply as Piet, who lived upstairs and stayed on until about 1990.

In 1991, the hotel was bought by Inge and Arnold Nauhaus, who renamed it McGregor Haus and ran a well-regarded restaurant there — both contributed recipes to a village recipe book produced that same year. Ownership then passed to Syd Dixon, under whom the business leaned more towards a liquor store than a hotel. Two women, Dianne and Jill — known locally as the Wiccan, or White Witch — helped him run the place, and the three of them later joined newcomer Pat Werdmuller to help establish a local SPCA, carrying out animal rescue and clinic work in the village. Syd subdivided the property and built the bottle store behind the hotel, which he then ran separately.

The next owners, Peter Friend and his wife, converted the old bar area into a grocery shop, while Mrs Friend became known for making and selling excellent fish and chips. After the Friends, the building became home to the Jack and Grape restaurant, run by Margie Deegan, who still lives in McGregor today.

McGregor Village Inn, and Stone River Today

Somewhere along this long line of owners and names — from Over Den Berg to McGregor Haus to the Jack and Grape — the building eventually settled into its more recent identity as the McGregor Village Inn, the name still used for the building as a whole. Today, its pub is known as Stone River, the latest chapter in a building that has spent well over a century changing shape and name while remaining, in one form or another, at the very centre of village life.