The museum's former school hall has been reimagined as the 'Ostrich Hall,' and the story it tells is one of extraordinary economic volatility. During Oudtshoorn's first feather boom, from 1865 to 1870, the value of ostrich feathers per pound nearly matched the value of diamonds. Fortunes were made overnight. The 'feather barons' who controlled the trade built lavish homes and invested in the town's infrastructure, transforming a small Karoo settlement into a place of surprising wealth. A second, smaller boom followed from 1900 to 1914, fueled by the Edwardian fashion for elaborate hats and boas. When the fashion changed, prices collapsed, but the physical evidence of that extravagance remains in Oudtshoorn's architecture. Among the Ostrich Hall's displays is a rock carved with images of running ostriches, discovered not in the Karoo but in the Sahara Desert, a reminder that the human fascination with these birds extends across continents and millennia.

The building itself is among the museum's finest exhibits. Bullock designed it in the late Victorian colonial style, and its sandstone facade is considered one of the best examples of stone masonry in the Little Karoo, good enough to earn it declaration as a national monument. The school hall added in 1912 by J.E. Vixeboxse was built in what is called the New Republican style, a blend of influences that reflects the cultural crosscurrents of early twentieth-century South Africa. The craftsmanship is evident in the precision of the stonework: each block was cut and fitted by hand in an era before mechanized construction reached the Karoo. Willem Adriaan Cruywagen, the Minister of National Education who certified the building as a national monument, cited this stonework as central to the building's heritage value. That it survived to receive that designation at all, given how close it came to demolition in 1963, makes the preservation feel earned rather than inevitable.

The CP Nel Museum is one of a small number of secular museums in the world to house a synagogue. The Jewish gallery was opened in 1973 at the suggestion of Isidore Barron, a member of the museum's Board of Trustees, and it preserves a chapter of Oudtshoorn's history that is easily overlooked. Jewish immigrants, many of Lithuanian origin, played a significant role in the ostrich feather trade during the boom years. They were among the merchants and middlemen who connected Karoo farmers with European fashion houses hungry for plumes. The synagogue within the museum stands as evidence of a community that once thrived in this unlikely corner of South Africa, drawn by the same economic currents that brought farmers, architects, and fortune-seekers to the ostrich capital of the world.

Beyond the ostrich trade, the CP Nel Museum documents the broader cultural life of the Little Karoo during the Victorian era and early twentieth century. The exhibits reconstruct the lifestyle of a region that was both remote and, during the feather booms, surprisingly cosmopolitan. Victorian-era furnishings sit alongside farming implements. Period fashions demonstrate the global demand that made Oudtshoorn's feathers valuable. The museum functions as a portrait of a town that experienced the full cycle of boom and bust, and emerged with its identity intact. Oudtshoorn today remains the largest town in the Little Karoo, with a population of about 67,000, and its economy still depends partly on ostrich farming, though tourism has become the dominant industry. The CP Nel Museum, saved from the wrecking ball, now anchors the town's sense of its own history.