The village originates in the
Middle Ages and is listed as a parish in 1328; mention of it occurs in the seventeenth-century copy of a 1399 document as
Pepergae (
Pepergo is also found, in 1408 and 1510)—
peper is a Frisian term for the boggy type of wetland on which the village was built. during war in 1413 at the time of the short-lived independence of the Stellingwerf area (comprising
Weststellingwerf and
Ooststellingwerf). The land was so wet that before 1660 the entire village, including the church, was moved one kilometer to a dryer area. It is found in the 1716
atlas by
Bernardus Schotanus à Sterringa as a
linear village with buildings exclusively on the north side of the road, except for a church on the south side, in the middle of the area. An 1850 atlas by
Wopke Eekhoff shows that the village's meadows were dug up completely for peat. A provincial road in 1828 between
Leeuwarden and
Zwolle was the impetus for the formation of a new village west of Peperga,
De Blesse. In 1865, the construction of a railway between
Zwolle and
Leeuwarden split the town in two: it separated Peperga from its west side, an area subsequently added to De Blesse. This division was boosted in the late eighties with the construction of a highway on the east side of the track. Peperga had its own railway station which opened in 1870 (with an adjoining cafe) and closed on January 5, 1941. In the early seventies, the station was demolished. The nearby bridge over the river
Linde is on the list of national state monuments as a
Rijksmonument. ==Notable landmarks==