The Colonial Secretary, the Colonial Treasurer, Charles Davidson Bell, the Surveyor-General and Sir Thomas Maclear, her Majesty's astronomer at the Cape, were among the pallbearers.
The town was founded in 1876 as Nqanqaru Drift but was later in 1882 renamed after Thomas Maclear.
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Named after Sir Thomas Maclear (1794-1879), famous astronomer who laid the foundation for a trigonometrical survey of the Cape Colony.
In 1750 Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille had measured a triangulation arc northwards from Cape Town, to determine the shape of the earth and found that the curvature of the earth was less in southern latitudes than at corresponding northern ones.
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