Bushman's River. The completion of the line to the coalfields the following year provided Estcourt with a good communications link to the coast. After a number of attempts to establish private schools had failed due to lack of support, the town's first government school, the Estcourt Government School was established in 1886 with an initial role of 45 children. In accordance with the prevailing colonial policy, the school only admitted pupils of European descent. In 1895, the traveller Ingram described Estcourt as having " ... buildings [that] are strong and substantial, being for the most part constructed of hewn stone. A fort crowns the hill to the southward. There are in the town three churches, four hotels, and at the station a railway bar, A commodious sanatorium in connection with the Roman Catholic Mission has recently been established near the town. The population is put down at about 300 residents, though on market days, quite a large throng of farmers are to be met in its streets." The mission station itself had been opened in 1892 - the second Augustinian Sisters establishment in Natal staffed mainly by French-speaking nuns from Canada and France. The mission had a school, sanatorium and a chapel for the Roman Catholic families in the town. The sanatorium was well used during the period when the railway line was being constructed and during the Boer War. Due to an economic depression after the war the school was unable to survive and the sanatorium had to complete with a nursing home that was run by one of the two doctors in the town. Changing attitudes after Vatican II and the opening of hospitals run by the Provincial Departments contributed to the order closing its mission and the sanatorium in Estcourt in the late 1960s. In 1899, when he arrived at Estcourt as a war correspondent, Churchill described the town as "a South African town—that is to say, it is a collection of about three hundred detached stone or corrugated iron houses, nearly all one-storied, arranged along two broad streets—for space is plentiful—or straggling away towards the country". The Boer War When the Anglo-Boer War broke out on 10 October 1899, the Boer forces had 21,000 men ready to invade the Colony of Natal. Ranged against them, the British had 13,000 men. The Boers under the command of General Petrus Joubert crossed the border into the Natal Colony