Middelwater No. 169: a farm history

From a loan farm on the Zwartberg to eight cadastral parcels: the full documented history of Middelwater No. 169 - Stretch's 1833 survey for Okert Oosthuizen, the twelve-farm grant day of 1841, the 1883 resurvey and the 1884 quitrent to J.D.J. Oosthuysen 'and another', the portions cut off for a spring called Vaste Water and a place called Avondrust, and the 1990 power-line survey whose coordinates finally put the farm on a map.

There are two Middelwaters. This one is Middelwater No. 169, in the Zwartberg north of Klaarstroom. A second Middelwater lies near Zeekoegat, a portion into which Rietfontein was subdivided in the early 1900s. They are not the same place and the records for them must never be pooled. Two parcels called Rietfontein are recorded here; this one is the Zeekoegat farm, not Riet Fontein No. 12. [FAMILY]

The place

Middelwater sits in the Zwartberg, in the Division of Prince Albert, in 1833 the Field Cornetcy of C. Hatting, by the 1920s the Field Cornetcy of Kredouw. Its neighbours run: Remhoogte north and west, Venterskloof west, Klein Vlei south, and to the east Rondabel and Klaarstroom. The Aapsrivier crosses the north-eastern corner; Meiringspoort lies away to the south-east and gives the district one of its two trigonometrical beacons.

The name is plain and it is a description: middle water. In this country the farms are named for where the water is.

Oosthuizens are on record on this ground for more than a century, from about 1821 to the 1920s, which is a different and more defensible statement than calling it an Oosthuizen farm.

The loan-farm era (1777–1841)

The oldest thread runs back to De Claar Stroom, a loan farm granted in 1777, of which Middelwater was the western edge. Loan farms were not owned; they were held annually at the Crown's pleasure, and they moved.

Cornelis Andries Oosthuizen (1792–1860) and his wife Johanna Machteld Petronella Strydom (1792–1860) were established here by about 1821 not yet verified. He was a son of Ockert Oosthuijzen of 1755 and therefore a brother of Ockert Almero Oosthuizen (1786–1859), the root ancestor of this project, which is why the family descends from both households at once.

In August 1833 the surveyor Charles Lennox Stretch measured the place (SG diagram 349/1833). His title block is worth quoting as he wrote it:

"The LOAN FARM Middle Water including the Government ground DROOGE KLOOF, containing 8843 Morgens, Surveyed for OKERT OOSTHUIZEN. Situated in the Zwarte Berg, Field Cornetcy of C. Hatting."

Two things sit in that sentence. The farm already absorbed Drooge Kloof, a piece of Government ground annexed to it at survey. And the applicant is written Okert Oosthuizen, a name that recurs in this family in every generation, so the survey applicant is kept as his own man rather than folded into any of those who might be him. Stretch bounded it north by Government ground, south by Klaar Water and Rondewal, east by Government ground, west by Klein Valle.

Then, on 15 April 1841, the Crown converted at least twelve Koup and Gouph loan farms to perpetual quitrent in one administrative act, and Middelwater was among them, deed Bf.W.Q.5-7. That day is told in full in The fifteenth of April, 1841. Two seasons of a surveyor walking boundaries with the occupier and the field cornet; one afternoon of signatures; the map of the district fixed for a century.

A household, and the deaths on it (1836–1871)

The farm's human record is thin but it is specific, and what survives is mostly the dying.

Ockert Almero Oosthuizen was born on Middelwater on 27 November 1836 and baptised at Beaufort West the following March. He farmed here into the 1920s and died in Church Street, Prince Albert, on 2 January 1922, a life of eighty-five years anchored on one farm.

Three deaths on the ground are recorded:

Where they are buried is not recorded. On remote ground the dead were normally buried on it, so Middelwater almost certainly has a werf cemetery that nobody here has read.

A second household was living here that the deeds never mention. A descendant of the family states that Jan Adriaan van Zyl was born on Middelwater on 9 November 1839: the son of Johanna Jacomina Oosthuizen, the root couple's eldest daughter, and her husband Wynand van Zyl. So a married daughter and her family were living on her father's farm in the years between Stretch's 1833 survey and the 1841 grant. [SRC-294][FAMILY][TO VERIFY]

The marriage was recorded here and the residence was not, and that is the shape of the gap rather than an accident: a title deed records who owns ground, never who is living on it. The November 1839 baptism entry would name the farm. See LEAD-0110.

The marriage that ties this farm to Vrolykheid is a generation later. On 1 December 1863 Ockert Almero, the boy born here in 1836, married Aletta Catharina Maria Helena Hitge, born on Vrolykheid in June 1846 and fatherless within seven weeks of her birth. Her mother Sophia Johanna Mocke then married Jacobus Daniel Johannes Oosthuizen, the man who would take the Middelwater quitrent in 1884. The two farms are joined by that household, not by a boundary.

Resurvey and freehold (1883–1884)

Under Act No. 9 of 1879 the old quitrent farms were resurveyed. In October 1883 Government Surveyor J.A. Thwaits remeasured Middelwater (SG diagram 1364/1883, later renumbered 3102), and the examiner Max Jurisch certified that "the numerical data of this diagram are sufficiently consistent." The extent came out at 10,731 morgen 100 square roods, against Stretch's 8,843 morgen fifty years before. Boundaries: Remhoogte north, Klein Vlei south, Rondable and Klaarstroom east, Remhoogte and Venterskloof west.

On 24 March 1884 the quitrent title issued, deed P.A.Q.3-3, "in favour of J. D. J. Oosthuysen and another." The first man is Jacobus Daniel Johannes Oosthuizen (1823–1903), who sat on the building committee of the Prince Albert church in 1860 and died a "retired gentleman" at 7 Schoonder Street, Cape Town. Who "and another" was is still unknown, one of this farm's two standing questions.

A caution about the size. The 1883 diagram gives the extent as 10,731 morgen, which is about 9,191 ha. The modern cadastral polygon for farm 169 measures 8,944 ha, within three percent of the 1883 figure, which is close agreement for a resurvey a century and a half apart. Note the trap in the numerals, because this district's figures fall into it easily: a morgen figure and a hectare figure for the same ground can look alike without being the same quantity. Extents in the two units are never quoted here as confirming each other.

The portions come off (1883–1927)

The verso of the 1883 diagram (DOC-0039) carries the deduction table, the running list of what was cut away:

Vaste Water is the smallest thing on this farm and the best documented, a spring, marked on the 1883 diagram, cut out as nine morgen of ground around the water. Its own diagram was surveyed in February 1923 and it went by transfer to Susanna Maria Klue, deed 3007. The date is not clean: the diagram's own transfer line says 26 April 1923, the 1883 verso says 26 May, same deed. Both are kept not yet verified.

Its surveyor, J. Loubser of Laingsburg, also left a beacon report, the kind of document that puts you on the ground better than any diagram. Beacon S was a monolith. Beacon B was built into a stone wall on the river bank. Beacon T was missing, being in the river bed.

Klein Vlei is a genuine unresolved case. It is carried as a Middelwater portion on the authority of SG 1459/1883, but the 1883 verso lists no such deduction, the 1989 servitude map shows no Klein Vlei portion, and the modern cadastre has a farm Klein Valie (6,297 ha) lying south-west. The likelier reading is that Klein Vlei was always the neighbour named on the 1883 diagram's southern boundary, not a piece of this farm not yet verified.

Power lines and coordinates (1988–1990)

In July 1988 and April and August 1989 the surveyor A.W. Reynolds measured two Eskom transmission servitudes across the farm, approved by the Surveyor-General on 17 October 1990 (L.G. 6955-90, with a companion endorsement sheet for diagram 6954/90). The two power lines are 47 m and 31 m wide. The beacons are 20 mm iron pegs set in stone heaps at the pylons, the twentieth century marking the veld in its own idiom.

By then the farm had a modern shape, and the diagram names it: Gedeelte 4, Gedeelte 5 (Vaste Water), Gedeelte 6 (Avondrust), and the Restant.

That servitude diagram matters more than a power line usually does. It carries a table of survey coordinates on the Lo 23° system, and converted off the Cape Datum they place the farm's portions on the modern map: every one of the five servitude beacons falls inside the very portion the diagram letters it onto. A 1990 power-line survey and the present-day cadastre, made a generation apart by people with no interest in each other's work, agree on where this ground is.

The chain of ownership

The farm it was cut from is the farm next door

Middelwater was the western edge of De Claar Stroom, the loan farm of 1777, and its eastern neighbour is Klaarstroom No. 178. Those are one sentence and not two: the 1777 loan farm and farm 178 are one piece of ground recorded under two epochs, before survey and after it, and not two farms at all.

The geometry makes the shape of the thing plain: farm 178's outline lies east of Middelwater's and the two touch, nearest edges 0.26 km apart. So the ground Middelwater was cut off is the ground still lying against its eastern boundary. The parent did not disappear; it is the neighbour.

That also explains something the 1833 survey says without spelling it out. Stretch measured Middelwater as diagram 349 and De Claar Stroom as 350, consecutive numbers, the same week. He was not surveying two farms that happened to adjoin. He was drawing the line that divided one.

Where they came from, and what they brought

The household on this ground from about 1821 was Cornelis Andries Oosthuizen and Johanna Machteld Petronella Strydom. His father was Ockert Oosthuizen, born 1755 and baptised plain Ocker, the same man who fathered Ockert Almero, this project's root ancestor. The two brothers are the whole reason the family descends from both households at once.

What their father did, and where, is on his own estate papers. He died in April 1809 at de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants River, near Citrusdal, and his estate was inventoried there on the 23rd, MOOC8/28.63. The inventory lists, among the kettles and the bedding, a working forge: a bellows, a ballast iron, two sledgehammers, a hand hammer, tongs and a vice. Beside it stand twelve pieces of timber, four yellowwood planks, "eenige stukken WAGEMAKERSHOUT", wagonmaker's wood, an ox-wagon, and a chaise marked DEFECT. The clerk walked the house room by room and named the room those tools stood in: the winkel, the smithy.

So the men who took up ground in the Zwartberg were a smith's sons. Not gentry, and not only stockmen: a trade, and one that travels. A forge is fixed capital, it wants charcoal and water and a reason for the district to come to you, and the family left one behind on the Olifants River and arrived here about twelve years later.

Two dates now anchor that move at each end: the father dead at Citrusdal in 1809, the son on record at Middelwater by about 1821. What happened in between is not documented here.

The occupation is read off the tools, the timber and the name of the room. No document calls him a smith, and the estate was wound up intestate, so no will states a trade either. It is inference, and it is marked as inference. An opgaafrol would give an occupation outright, see LEAD-0078 and LEAD-0079 on which roll to read.

The year the springs failed

Three deaths are recorded on this ground. The first of them now has a season around it.

Susanna Catharina Oosthuizen died on Middelwater on 24 September 1856. She was thirty-seven, and had been on the farm since 1836.

That September falls inside the drought of 1856 to 1859, the one that broke the earlier records: the years in which, at Beaufort West, many springs dried up and the town had to pool what its remaining springs gave to keep any irrigation at all. A correspondent of the Government Gazette wrote of the town that year: "Beaufort West is hard up and business is dead."

That is Beaufort West's record, not Middelwater's, and the distance matters, about 91 km. Nothing here says the springs on this farm failed, and no document ties her death to the drought. What can be said is narrower and still worth saying: she died on a farm named for its water, in the third year of a drought that was drying the springs of the nearest place where anyone was writing the weather down.

For a farm called middle water, that is the context the record was missing.

One piece of the farm is silent

Ten of Middelwater's eleven recorded parcels can be drawn on the map, and set against the whole-farm outline of 1883 they make one thing impossible to miss. Portion 3 is 3,545 hectares, two fifths of the original farm, and there is no paper on it at all. It is absent from the 1883 verso deduction table (DOC-0039), and absent from the 1989 servitude map's own list of what the farm then consisted of (DOC-0040), which names only Gedeelte 4, Gedeelte 5, Gedeelte 6 and the Restant. A piece that size leaving the farm without a trace in either list is not a gap in the record so much as a question about it.

Two smaller things fall out of the same exercise. The Restant, what is left of Middelwater today, is 379 hectares of an original 10,731 morgen, about 9,191 ha, which is about four percent. And Portion 1, 2,352 ha, is the "169/1, part marked pink" of the 1883 verso, so the deduction table does name it, without ever saying what it was called or who took it.

Where this farm sits in Stretch's season

Middelwater's 1833 diagram is numbered 349, and it sits at the front of a tight run: De Claar Stroom at 350, Reim Hoogte at 351, Klaarstroom at 354, Vrolykheid at 355, Oorlogs Kloof at 356, Haggas at 357, Rietkuil at 361, Rondabel at 366, Klipfontein at 369 and Modderdrift at 371.

Eleven farms inside twenty-two numbers. Whatever else that month was, it was not leisurely, and Middelwater and the farm it was cut from were measured back to back. Middelwater also carries the lowest quitrent folio of the group, 5-7.

What this story is about

• set on Middelwater
• set on Avondrust (Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 6)
• set on Vaste Water (Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 5)
• set on Klein Vlei (Middelwater portion)
• set on Moreson (Middelwater No. 169 Remainder)
• set on Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 1
• set on Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 2
• set on Remainder (Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 2)
• set on Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 3
• set on Ebeneser (Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 4)
• set on Middelwater No. 169 Ptn 7
• about Cornelis Andries Oosthuizen
• about Johanna Machteld Petronella Strydom
• about Okert Oosthuizen
• about Ockert Almero Oosthuizen
• about Jacobus Daniel Johannes Oosthuizen
• about Susanna Maria Klue

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. Surveyor-General diagram, 349/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 349/1833
2. Surveyor-General diagram, 1364/1883, October 1883 Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 1364/1883
3. Diagram verso, 1364/1883 (verso), 1883 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 1364/1883 (verso)
4. Surveyor-General diagram, A.332/1923, February 1923 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm A.332/1923
5. Surveyor's report, A.332/1923 (report), 6 February 1923 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm A.332/1923 (report)
6. Surveyor-General diagram, L.G. 6955-90, July 1988–August 1989 Surveyor-GeneralL.G. 6955-90
7. Surveyor-General diagram, L.G. 6954/90, 1990 Surveyor-GeneralL.G. 6954/90; survey record E 131/90; deed K.354/96s
8. Middelwater No.169 resurvey diagram Surveyor-General / Deeds e-portalSG Dgm 1364/1883
9. Middelwater No.169 original loan-farm diagram (1833) Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 349/1833
10. Middelwater No.169 1883 diagram - reverse: deduction table Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 1364/1883 (verso)
11. Middelwater No.169 servitude map (Eskom power line) Surveyor-GeneralL.G. 6955-90
12. Middelwater / Vaste Water diagram, 1923 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm A.332/1923
13. Vaste Water beacon report, 1923 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm A.332/1923 (report)
14. Middelwater No.169 - servitude endorsement sheet (Eskom power line), SG Dgm 6954/90 Surveyor-GeneralL.G. 6954/90; survey record E 131/90; deed K.354/96s
15. Fred van Zyl on the b7c3d2/b7c3d3 distinction, Jan Adriaan van Zyl's Middelwater birth, and the Casper van Zyl of De Cango Private family correspondenceLetter of 6 Aug 2026, in Afrikaans, with one same-day correction

Research notes

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