The Post Offices
Older than the village it served.
The mail reached this mountain before there was a town on it — before the fields were proclaimed, before the stands were surveyed, and while the Republic was still not certain the ground under its own office belonged to it.
Before there was a village
In 1882 the Republic sent a Gold Commissioner here to a mountain with no town on it. There was no proclamation, no survey, no stands and no township: the fields were thrown open as public diggings in 1885, and the stands were surveyed in 1887.
What there was, almost at once, was a postal service. In November 1882 the Postmaster-General forwarded the Commissioner's letter on postal communication with the diggings and recommended that a postmaster be appointed in the person of the Commissioner's own clerk. By April 1883 the Government was calling for tenders to carry the mail from Mare's place to the office of the Gold Commissioner.
That is the first post office. It was not a building. It was a man's office — and the mail was contracted to arrive there.
The office that kept moving
And for its first year, that office had no fixed home.
In August 1882 the Commissioner was working under canvas. He advertised for tenders to put up an office and nobody answered.
What followed was a year of failed buildings, withdrawn contractors and arguments with Pretoria about buying a house instead. On 27 August 1883 he finally took possession of a building and sent a cheque for it through the Landdrost of Lydenburg. Which building, and where it stood, is not established.
Two men and a change of route — 1883
On 22 January 1883 two men, Barrett and Seidel, applied jointly to be appointed Postmasters at Kaapsche Hoop — and asked for the postal route to be changed.
The date matters, and it is not quite what it looks like. On 22 January 1883 the neighbouring farm Berlin did not belong to any Barrett. It belonged to W. Albrecht, whose advocate had been demanding since September 1882 that the Government stop issuing digging licences on it — and in December 1882 the Gold Commissioner reported his belief that Berlin overlapped onto government ground.
Four weeks after the postmaster application, the Government was told that Berlin had been sold to Charles Barrett. The Barretts then took the dispute to court, and won it the following year. In January 1884 the Acting Commissioner had to write to Pretoria asking how to read the judgment — because if the boundary fell where the survey placed it, the office and the camp stood inside the farm.
There was no village yet. The mail was coming to a Commissioner's office on ground nobody could be certain belonged to the State — and within a month of two men offering to carry it, the farm that might have been standing under it changed hands.
It was settled in the State's favour. It was not settled quickly, and a claim on the office ground itself was still alive more than a year later. How that was resolved is followed on the guided walk.
Whether Barrett and Seidel were ever appointed is not recorded in any document yet found.
A room on a plan — 1884
When a digger named P. A. Ogilvie drew the plan for the Government Offices in July 1884, he set aside a room and marked it “P. Office.”
A room, in a shared building. The Commissioner's office was in the same range, and so were a courtroom, a dining room and two bedrooms. The State, the mail and the court under one roof — which is what a frontier administration looked like when it was thin.
The telegraph reached the village in 1889, on the Middelburg–Barberton line, and for a time the district's postal and telegraph work ran through one man.
The village's own record holds that the post and telegraph office moved for a period into the front rooms of the house the Government had built for the Landdrost's clerk, J. A. Brink, on Stands 33 and 34. The government files for the same year place the office in the Government building. Both accounts are recorded here; neither is settled.
An office drawn, and never built — 1889
In December 1889 the Republic specified a proper government block for this village: a Landdrost's office, a Mining Commissioner's office, a post office and a telegraph office under one roof. The drawing and printed specification went to the Special Landdrost in January 1890, and he acknowledged receiving them.
Then nothing. Within the year, three of the four offices it was designed to hold had ceased to exist.
The building empties — 1891
At the turn of 1890 the establishment was abolished. The Special Landdrost's office and the Mining Commissioner's office here were done away with and replaced by a clerk and a justice of the peace. The rooms fell vacant.
In February 1891 the Telegraph Department was authorised to work the telegraph from the Government building — “now unused.”
The post office did not move. It acquired the run of an emptying building. And for the next seven years the paperwork is a slow record of that building coming apart: the telegraphist asking for repairs in 1893; a burglar through the front window at the end of that year; an inspector calling in 1896; the roof reported in October 1897, the ceiling in November, the wall in April 1898.
A building of its own — 1898
The project was revived in December 1897, cut down to what was left: a Post and Telegraph Office with a Director's dwelling. The contractor was H. Wilke, and the local building commission reported on his work weekly through the winter of 1898. Ten curtains were bought that December, and the building was finished the same month.
It stood in the block of stands across the Plein from the Government Building — Stands 27 to 30, on Kantoor Street. Three plans give three slightly different answers, and the precise erf of the building within that block is not settled.
It is the only one of these arrangements that was built to be a post office. It is not the one that survives.
The building was sold at a government auction in 1991 and altered. Some years afterwards it burnt down, and what stands on the ground today was built again after the fire. How much of 1898 is underneath it, if anything, is not established.
The postmaster and the magazine — 1892
In September 1892 the Resident Justice of the Peace had the postmaster, Thomas Alfred Petersen, arrested for theft from the State.
Petersen held both the post office and the ammunition magazine — and both were short. He was suspended and an acting postmaster appointed. The case was still running five years later.
The following year the office was broken into through the front window. And in January 1900, six months before the occupation, the postmaster wrote to Pretoria about geese getting into the vegetable garden.
Sources: State Secretary and Public Works correspondence of the South African Republic, 1882–1900; the specifications of 1889 and 1897; the 1898 building commission reports and payment certificates; Deeds Office reservation annotations for Stands 33 and 34; a 1999 newspaper feature on the village; and local record held in the project archive. Full citations are held in the project research file and are covered on the guided walk.