The History of Piket Bo Berg JOHN PAULUS EKSTEEN VERSFELD

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