The History of Piket Bo Berg JOHN PAULUS EKSTEEN VERSFELD

The History of Piket Bo Berg
JOHN PAULUS EKSTEEN VERSFELD
To understand the Piketberg Mountain properly it is necessary to know the story of John Versfeld. So
writes Molly D’Arcy Thompson in her book “Forgotten Corners of the Cape” (published in 1979).
The amazing structure of the Versfeld Pass which John constructed up the steep slopes of the Mountain
so that he could easily access the village of Piketberg from his mountain farm, has ensured that his
name is remembered for posterity.
Apparently John used to sit at the top of the mountain, smoking his pipe, and viewing the village
below, contemplating how he could build a road down the steep mountainside so saving the long
journey across the mountain and down the other side at the mission station of Goedverwacht and then
round the southern end of the mountain - a very long journey in a horse drawn cart! His wife had
given birth to 15 children, and the long haul to the village had meant there had been a few anxious
moments. He also needed to be able to get his produce to the fruit packaging complex and the railway
line if he was to be successful in his farming ventures.
So, the story goes, one night he woke up with the moonlight shining on his watch and chain on his
bedside table. The chain was twisted and kinked and looped back on itself. “That’s it!” he cried,
startling his wife, “That is what I will do with my pass!”
In 1889 he began the work, with twenty farm labourers and an overseer. He, simply a farmer, made all
his own measuring instruments and relied entirely on his own commonsense, and so solved the
difficulty of the hairpin bends by turning them into loops which doubled back on each other. Every bit
of the pass was his own careful work. He set off every morning at dawn on his grey horse “Moscow”,
returning after dark. There was just one day, the day his son Jack was born, when he stayed at home,
and all that day’s work had to be done again as the gradient was too steep. In three months his road
was an accomplished fact just as it stands now, except that it has been widened in the course of the
years.
Who, then was John Versfeld? Of Dutch descent, his mother died when he was only two years old
and he went to live with his grandparents in Wynberg. Here he began his schooling, walking three
miles there and back each day. His father remarried, and John left school early to help his father on the
farm Slang Kop in the district of Groene Kloof, where there was a Moravian Mission.
His claim to fame is that he was a cousin of Hildagonda Duckitt, the well-known writer of old Cape
recipes. John’s aunt, Hildagonda Versfeld, married Mr. Duckitt of Groote Poste farm also in the
Groene Kloof district. The Duckitts, Versfelds and Melcks were all related.
John left home and the happy, friendly neighbourhood of Groene Kloof at twenty-four to manage a
farm near Caledon. His father, who had a big second family, was only able to give his eldest son a
horse and a suit of clothes, and with these as his sole possessions he went off to make his own way in
the world. While at Caledon John fell in love with Mary Elizabeth Metcalfe, the eldest daughter of a
neighbouring farmer. Although Mary had another suitor, the dashing John, with his auburn locks,
wooing her with romantic ballads and dazzling her by vaulting upon his horse, won her hand! They
were married in 1863 when Mary was not yet eighteen and John twenty-five.
They had been married about five years when, in 1867, John bought Langeberg farm up on the
Mountain. He was determined to make a living there, against the advice of those who thought they

knew better and warned him that he was bound to fail. He wanted to be his own master; he had saved
a few hundred pounds, he had a flock of merino sheep, his faithful shepherd Danje Engelbrecht with
wife and children, besides a farmhand and his wife. “And so, with Mother to stand by him,” said his
daughter Jessie, “(he never did anything without her whole-hearted co-operation,)” he moved there
with his young wife and two little daughters, a wagon and a span of mules, horses and a cart.
The farmhouse was quite primitive, with mud floors and no ceilings or glass in the windows; the first
night a leopard jumped into the sheep-kraal and carried off a sheep.
When John arrived on the Piketberg Mountain the only people making a living there were the Lucas
family, a widow and her four sons, living on a neighbouring farm Tweefontein.
They were industrious and very skilled at growing and making roll tobacco; their Lucas brand was
considered to be the best obtainable, and they retained this reputation until their descendants gave up
tobacco for fruit-growing. The Lucas’s taught John this line of farming, which he pursued with
success; in his turn he was able to show them the advantage of merino sheep farming over the stock
they were keeping.
John’s daughter, Jessie, writes, “When I was born in mid-winter they say I never saw the sun for a
fortnight, and Papa used to ride over to Voorste Vlei in the pouring rain every day to try to save his
lambs, but they all died. It was no wonder that the lonely life began to tell on Mother’s health and
Papa decided that he had been wrong to bring her so far from civilization. He has often told us how he
had written an advertisement for the farm when Mother came along and made him tear it up and said
she would try again. One of her sisters came to stay with her and from that time there was never any
thought of giving up.”
Life on the mountain top was hard for the young people. But John found a source of help and strength
in the Mission of Goedverwacht, which lay deep in the valley below his farms Langeberg and
Voorstevlei. Without the support of the Mission they would scarcely have been able to carry on.
Among John Versfeld’a achievements on the mountain was a gravel road he made into Goedverwacht
valley. When he wanted to ride to Malmesbury or Darling where his father lived, he followed the
narrow road he had made along the mountain side, which drops steeply to the valley below, then along
the river to Goedverwacht and out onto the plain. This is the road the Mission folk used to take to join
in social events on the mountain
To get to Piketberg village from the mountain top in those days was no easy matter. When a new baby
had to be christened John and Mary took the cart as far as possible, then they rode down the bridlepath,
servants carried the baby and toddlers, and the harness was laid on two spare horses. A cart was
kept at Deze Hoek, where the nearest neighbours of their own kind farmed. From Deze Hoek they
drove to Piketberg where the Minister, the Magistrate and the Schoolmaster lived – as yet there was no
doctor. Here they could converse with educated people: their mountain neighbours were hardworking,
kindly but illiterate folk.
In 1872 John bought the largest and best farm on the mountain – Moutonsvallei, for £1,000 cash. He
immediately began to build a new, spacious house beside it, and except for one large addition a few
years later, it was much the same until fairly recently. It lies in a sheltered valley, protected by the
mountain behind.
Then John began planting trees and fruit trees all over his land. Molly D’Arcy Thompson writes, “A
hundred years earlier, however, somewhere about 1780, an unknown man, perhaps a Mouton, came
into the wilds and planted a wonderful garden. Its boundary fences were dog-rose hedges many feet

high and wide. There were some tall thick-stemmed orange trees, planted in a grove longer than
broad, say about six trees by twelve, and down its length on the north side stood a row of mighty pears,
mostly sweet saffron….. On the south side of the orange grove was a row of walnut trees; there was a
large peach orchard, a dozen or so of apricots, two almonds, a few fig trees, two or three apple trees, a
New Year plum, even a nectarine right in the middle of the peach orchard – a quince hedge, a
pomegranate hedge, a clump of bamboos and a large stretch of vineyard. Add to these two mighty
oaks and a row of blue-gums and you have a picture of the little paradise into which they moved from
Langeberg….”
John continued this valuable work by planting apple trees, French pears from his Uncle at
Classenbosch and quick-growing gums and pine trees to give shade; then finding that his first oak trees
flourished, he started an oak nursery and in due course there were 4 000 oaks in avenues and
plantations. Jessie notes that her Mother and Nurse watered the tiny tree seedlings with her bathwater!
The family had fifteen children: there was a governess in the school-room, and later on elder sisters
returned from school and taught the younger children.
John’s youngest son, Walter, was only four when his father died. Moutonsvallei farm was divided
between him and an elder brother, and Walter built a delightful gabled house, Stawel Klip, overlooking
the valley. He farmed on the Mountain for 66 years.
Today the Mountain is an important deciduous-fruit producing district of the Cape, as well as growing
buchu, a project started by one of John’s sons. This mountain top, where orchards now stretch
wherever there is flat and fertile soil, was weaned from its rugged natural state by the green and loving
fingers of John Paulus Eksteen Versfeld.