The settlement was laid out on the farm Gryshoek by Dirk Cornelis (Swart Dirk) Uys (1814–1910), proclaimed in 1859 by
President Pretorius, and administered by a village council from 1910. Swart Dirk Uys, who surveyed the property using a 50-yard thong made from an
eland he shot on arrival, originally named the town Uysenburg, but the name was changed by the Executive Council of the
South African Republic to Marthinus-Wesselstroom, after the president's first names, and also known as Wesselstroom. In 1904, the name of the town was changed again to Wakkerstroom, meaning "awake stream" or "lively stream", which is an
Afrikaans translation of the
Zulu name for the river (
English:
awake) that flows near the town. The courthouse, St. Mark's Church, and the old bridge over the river have been declared national monuments.
H. Rider Haggard's novel
She: A History of Adventure was written while he lived on Hoog Street. The bridge dates to 1893, when it was built under the
South African Republic from
German steel. South Africa's first black member of the Christ Community Church was baptized by Reverend D. Bryant in 1904.
First Boer War Wakkerstroom was occupied by the
58th (Rutlandshire) Regiment of Foot, the
80th Regiment of Foot (Staffordshire Volunteers), and
1st King's Dragoon Guards in 1880–1881 during the
First Boer War. Remains of the Staffordshire and Dragoon encampments can be found on the slopes of the Ossewakop and Voortrekkerkop passes south of town.
Second Boer War During the
Second Boer War, the British built twenty-one
blockhouses between
Volksrust and Wakkerstroom and a hundred between Wakkerstroom and
Piet Retief, Mpumalanga. The blockhouses were built to guard the British supply lines from
Durban. ==Economy==