The fifteenth of April, 1841

One surveyor works the Koup for two seasons. Eight years later, on a single day, the Crown turns a dozen loan farms into freehold - and the map of the district is set for a century.

The Koup and the Gouph, 1833–1841

A date that kept turning up

It started as a coincidence. The 1834 diagram of Varsche Fontein carries a title deed dated 15 April 1841. So does Middelwater. So does Klaarstroom. So does Spreeuw Fontein, and Rondabel, and Vrolykheid, and Wit Plaats.

Seven farms, one day. Then a local history added three more. Angeliersbosch to the Luttig brothers, Scholtzkloof to Louisa Erasmus, Toornitzkraal to a Meyer. Then a Stellenbosch thesis on a Swanepoel family, written for entirely different reasons, produced two more: Rietkuil No. 119, 14,379 morgen on the Kouka River, to Pieter Johannes Swanepoel, and Wolwekraal No. 17, 14,502 morgen on the Rietbron road, to Johannes Hendrik Venter.

Twelve farms, and then more as the diagrams came in. The record now holds twenty-one title deeds dated 15 April 1841, on twenty separate parcels, something over 130,000 morgen turned from occupation into title between one sunrise and the next.

The deed numbers give it away

The Beaufort West quitrent register runs its folios in a block:

Consecutive folios, one clerk, one bundle. These were not twelve separate decisions. They were one decision executed many times over, and the paperwork was done in a sitting.

The bundle is wider than a single volume. Most of it sits in volume 5 of the Beaufort West quitrent register, which runs to at least folio 43, and volume 6 is in use as well. De Claar Stroom carries a P.A.Q. reference, the Prince Albert series, which did not exist in 1841 and into which that farm must have been re-registered once the division was created.

Rietkuil No. 119 is the one entry two sources will not agree on. Its 1841 diagram gives the reference as Bf.W.Q. 3-35 and the 2003 Stellenbosch thesis reads the register as Quits Vol 5 Fol 35. One digit apart, on the folio that would put the farm inside the volume-5 block or outside it. Neither reading has been checked against the register itself, so this page carries both and settles neither not yet verified.

The farms the first table does not name:

Haggas is worth a second look. It is in the Beaufort West quitrent volume with everything else here, on a Stretch diagram numbered in the same August 1833 run, and it lies in the Willowmore registration division, in what is now the Eastern Cape. Either the divisional boundary moved after 1841, or the farm was administered from Beaufort West before Willowmore existed as a division. not yet verified, it bears on nothing in this story except to say that the bundle reached further east than the district does.

And it was surveyed eight years earlier

Here is the part that makes it a story rather than a filing curiosity.

Every one of these farms had already been measured, most of them in 1833 and 1834, most of them by the same man. Charles Lennox Stretch signed the Middelwater diagram in August 1833, Vrolykheid in August 1833, Klaarstroom in August 1833, Rondabel in 1833, and Varsche Fontein in 1834 "for Mr Charl du Toit and Z.", in "the Field Cornetcy of Mr De Beer".

And on 24 July 1833, on a farm called Vlakfontein in the Koup, a stock farmer named Pieter Johannes Swanepoel signed a note in front of the same field cornet. (The document signs him only "P J Swanepoel", and four men of that name are held here; he is very probably the man granted Rietkuil eight years later, but the note does not say so and this page does not either.)

Ik ondergetekende verklaar mits dese volkomen te vreeden te syn met de wyse waarop de plaats de Vlakfontein door den landmeter den Heer Stretch is opgemeten geworden en dat de bakens aan my behoorlyk zyn aangewesen.

I the undersigned declare myself entirely satisfied with the way the place Vlakfontein has been measured by the surveyor Mr Stretch, and that the beacons have been properly shown to me.

— Gouph, 24 July 1833. M de Beer, Veldkornet. P J Swanepoel.

Volkomen te vreeden. Entirely satisfied. A man walking his own boundary with a surveyor, being shown where his corners are, and putting his name to it.

The same surveyor. The same field cornet. The same season. On documents that reached us from a Surveyor-General's office and from a university library, a hundred and seventy years apart, with nobody intending them to be read together.

What actually happened, then

The shape is now clear enough to say plainly.

1833–34. The government sends Stretch into the Koup and the Gouph to measure the loan farms, places families had held for a generation or more on annual licence, with no boundary anyone could defend. He works farm by farm, plants beacons, has the occupier sign that the beacons were shown to him. Field cornets M. de Beer and C. Hatting walk the ground with him.

1834–41. Seven years of nothing, as far as the paper shows. The diagrams sit. The families go on farming.

15 April 1841. The Crown converts the lot to perpetual quitrent in one bundle.

Whatever caused the seven-year gap, and it is worth finding out, the effect was that the cadastral map of this district was drawn in two seasons of fieldwork and ratified on a single afternoon. Nearly every farm boundary in these pages traces back to Stretch's beacons. When A.J. de Villiers built his stone-and-lime pillars on Welbedacht in 1924, he was subdividing inside lines a man had walked ninety years before.

Who got them

Names worth holding on to, because they are the founding roll of the district:

• Middelwater. The 1841 deed's copy here names no grantee not yet verified. The 1833 diagram was surveyed for Okert Oosthuizen (almost certainly Ockert Almero, 1786–1859, the root ancestor of this history), and eight years is a short gap, but the deed has to say it.
• Vrolykheid. Jacobus Johannes Oosthuisen (an Oosthuizen farm eighty years before it was a Marincowitz one)
• Wit Plaats, out of Vrolykheid. N. Hitge
• Varsche Fontein No. 27. Charl du Toit (Andries Son)
• Spreeuw Fontein No. 26. C.F.J. Meyer (fifty years later, the gold)
• Rondabel. David Jan Strydom
• Klaarstroom No. 184. Christian Hatting Senior (the field cornet himself)
• Rietkuil No. 119. Pieter Johannes Swanepoel
• Wolwekraal No. 17. Johannes Hendrik Venter
• Angeliersbosch, the Luttig brothers
• Scholtzkloof. Louisa Erasmus (a woman granted a farm in her own name)
• Toornitzkraal. Meyer

Four of these families. Oosthuizen, Hitge, Strydom, Meyer, are in this family tree. One of them, the Swanepoels of Rietkuil, turns out to be cousins by a route nobody was looking for: their common ancestor with Frans is a Flemish soldier who landed at the Cape in 1699.

The folios run with the diagram numbers

Eleven of Stretch's August 1833 diagrams carry a legible folio. Set the diagram number against the quitrent folio and they climb together, without exception:

348→6, 349→7, 351→10, 352→11, 353→16, 354→17, 356→30, 357→31, 369→43. Nine legible pairs and no exceptions, and, better than a trend, four consecutive pairs: 348/349 → 6/7, 351/352 → 10/11, 353/354 → 16/17, and 356/357 → 30/31. A clerk working down a stack of diagrams in the order they were numbered is not an inference from a correlation any more. It is visible four times over.

One of those four pairs was a prediction before it was a fact. The sequence left exactly one slot between 351 → 10 and 353 → 16, and when Vrisch Gewagt's diagram, B352, was read it carried title Bf.W.Q. 5-11, the number the sequence required. A pattern that holds on a document nobody had read when it was proposed is doing more work than a pattern fitted to what was already on the table.

That matters for the argument of this page. If the bundle was one decision executed many times over, and the clerk worked through Stretch's diagrams in the order they were numbered, that is precisely the fingerprint you would expect the folios to carry, and it is the fingerprint they do carry.

It also constrains the two folios nobody can read. Vrolykheid's diagram, B355, sits between 354 → 17 and 356 → 30, so its folio falls between 18 and 29; 26 is taken by Spreeuw Fontein, so between 18 and 25. The lowest value in that window is 18, and 18 is one glyph from the 1B actually typed. Rondabel's diagram sits between 357 → 31 and 369 → 43, so its folio should fall between 32 and 42, while what is transcribed is 5-2?, in the twenties, lower than the farms on either side of it.

Neither is proof, and the run is demonstrably not ordered by diagram number alone: Spreeuw Fontein's 5-26 sits on an 1834 diagram, so the later surveys interleave with the earlier ones somewhere in the volume. What the sequence does is make 1B very hard to read as a folio in its own right, in a column that goes 7, 10, 17, 30, 43, there is no room for an entry that is not a number. not yet verified

Still open

• Why 1841? Was there a Cape ordinance, a survey backlog cleared, a new Surveyor-General? Twenty grants in one day is administrative, not personal, and the reason should be findable in the Cape records. What the evidence here points at is a backlog cleared by batch signature rather than a settlement scheme: every one of these farms was already occupied and the diagrams say so in their own words: "the LOAN FARM Middle Water", "the Loan Farm Vrolykheid with the annexed Government ground": the surveys ripened for years before title, and the field cornet is himself one of the grantees, which a settlement scheme does not do. not yet verified
• How many more? Twenty parcels is what the documents here carry. The real number for that day, across the Beaufort West district, is probably larger. The quitrent register itself would settle it, and it would also say whether the entry dates differ from the deed date, which is the difference between a decision taken on 15 April and a stack of prepared deeds signed on it.
• What did each one cost? Perpetual quitrent carried an annual rent. The amounts would say a great deal about what the government thought this land was worth.
• Are any of Stretch's 1833 beacons still standing?

Sources

• Surveyor-General diagrams and amended-title diagrams: DOC-0001 – DOC-0010, DOC-0037 – DOC-0051.
• Willis & Atkinson, Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo, Karoo Foundation. [SRC-068]
• C.H. Swanepoel, 'n Tak van die Swanepoel-familie in Suid-Afrika, 1699 tot 1999, MA thesis, Universiteit van Stellenbosch, 2003, for Rietkuil, Wolwekraal and the Vlakfontein survey declaration. [SRC-072]

What this story is about

• set on Middelwater
• set on Varsche Fontein
• set on Spreeuw Fontein & Toornits Kraal (Spreeufontein No. 26)
• set on Rondabel
• set on Vrolikheid
• set on Wit Plaats (Vrolikheid No. 177 Ptn 1)
• set on Klaarstroom No. 184 (Klaarstroom A)
• set on Angeliersbosch
• set on Scholtzkloof
• set on Rietkuil No. 119 (Kouka)
• set on Wolwekraal No. 17
• set on Vlakfontein (Koup)
• about Charles Lennox Stretch
• about M. de Beer (veldkornet)
• about Okert Oosthuizen
• about Jacobus Johannes Oosthuisen (Almero's son)
• about Pieter Johannes Swanepoel (b6c5d7)
• about Johannes Hendrik Venter

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. Thesis, 2003 Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526view it online →
2. Surveyor-General diagram, 356/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 356/1833
3. Surveyor-General diagram, 369/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 369/1833
4. Surveyor-General diagram, 351/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 351/1833 (vice 8472/50)
5. Surveyor-General diagram, 349/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 349/1833
6. Surveyor-General diagram, B348/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)dgm B348/1833
7. Surveyor-General diagram, B353/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)dgm B353/1833
8. Surveyor-General diagram, 357/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)dgm 357/1833
9. Surveyor-General diagram, 150/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-General, Cape Town (SGCTN)dgm 150/1833
10. Surveyor-General diagram, B.326/1833, September 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm B.326/1833
11. Rose Willis & Doreen Atkinson, "Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo" (2022) Karoo Development Foundation38pp cameoview it online →
12. 'n Tak van die Swanepoel-familie in Suid-Afrika, 1699 tot 1999: 'n genealogiese en kultuurhistoriese studie Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526view it online →
13. Surveyor-General diagram, 350/1833, August 1833 Landmeter-Generaal, KaapstadNo. 350/1833; surveyed August 1833 by C. Lennox Stretch, Land Surveyor; copied from the diagram relating to Title Deed No. P.A.Q. 5-8 dated 15.4.1841; endorsed 27-4-1959; scale in Rhynland Roods
14. Surveyor-General diagram, 361/1833, September 1833 Landmeter-Generaal, KaapstadNo. 361/1833; surveyed September 1833 by C. L. Stretch, Land Surveyor; Title Bf.W.Q. 3-35 dated 15th April 1841; endorsed 15.9.1966; scale in Rhynland Roods

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.