Klerksdorp Midweek, Klerksdorp - It is Heritage Month and we are looking back through the archives at the nearly 187 years of existence of Klerksdorp.
Late in 1837, a group of 12 Voortrekker families, having agreed to assist Hendrik Grobler (a pioneer farmer who, by then, has been farming for a few years on his farm Elendsheuwel next to the Skoonspruit) to build a weir in the Spruit, each received a plot of land from Grobler.
These plots stretched from the wagon road that ran all along the eastern foot of the hills today known as “Oudorp Koppies”, to the Skoonspruit. The wagon road would, in turn, become Hendrik Potgieter Street.
Klerksdorp continued as a small farming settlement till 1886 (only receiving official town status in September 1888), when everything changed irrevocably.
For in November 1885, gold was discovered on the farm Ysterspruit to the southwest of town, soon to be followed by yet more discoveries on the town commonage (the land between Goudkoppie Heritage Hill and Matlosana Mall).
The huge influx of fortune seekers soon led to Klerksdorp’s “Old Town”, hemmed in by the hills and the spruit, running out of habitable space. And thus was born Klerksdorp New Town on the eastern side of Skoonspruit. New Town (or “Nuwedorp” as most residents refer to it) had inauspicious origins as a shantytown rising from the Western Transvaal grasslands almost overnight, with everything from tents and wooden “lean-to’s” to “houses in a box” (pre-fabricated corrugated iron houses imported from abroad as a kit) serving as accommodation.
- Courtesy of Klerksdorp Museum.
