The Elsieskraal has been the source of pleasure and pain for those living in Pinelands. Jose Burman in his book Safe to the Sea writes “The Elsieskraal is a river of history, intimately connected with the Development of the early Cape, from its source where it supplied the lifeblood of the pioneer farms to its …
The area around the BP Garage on Forest Drive and extending over the Oval was once the site of the largest brickfields in the southern hemisphere with reputedly the best bricks in Africa. A railway line stretched from the Francis Road area through Scouts Place and across the lower Oval to its junction at the …
In 1881, the son of Langalibalele’s enemy, Mpande, was imprisoned on the farm Oude Molen, which adjoins Uitvlugt. It is well documented that Cetshwayo visited Langalibalele who was not permitted to leave the farm and they spent many hours taking long walks and hunting jackals, rabbit and birds together on the land that we now …
Two female skeletons, complete with traditional beadwork, were unearthed during road works in the vicinity of Homestead Way in 1935. The story behind this discovery goes back to the early 1800s when the Hlubi clan lived in the foothills of the Drakensberg. Langalibalele was born in 1814 and became King in 1836 after his brother …
In the middle of the last century historians referred to the Pinelands area as being a sandy waste sporadically covered with scrub. When Bishop Colenso visited the Uitvlugt farm in 1880 he described it as a miserable place with inhospitable soil. The sand so closely resembled the Kalahari Desert that camels were trained there. In …
The rinderpest was decimating the oxen population in the late 1800’s. To overcome the lack of oxen, camels which had been proven to be immune to the rinderpest, were imported. These were to be trained at the Uitvlugt Forestry Station. in February 1897, 10 one-humped camels arrived from Tenerife on the Canary Islands. Eight of …
The Bubonic plague which started in 1894 China was first identified in Cape Town in 1901 when a dock worker, E.A. McCallum was admitted to the Rondebosch and Mowbray Cottage Hospital as suffering from the plague. The source was among the rats in the stored horse fodder which had arrived from South America, to be …
In the early days the Uitvlugt manor house was the first outspan for the farmers’ wagons leaving Cape Town after crossing the Varsche Drift across the Liesbeeck and Black Rivers in the River Club area. This track was till evident in the 1920’s and could be seen passing the Pinelands station site, then past the …
