Places of Interest – Wellington MuseumWe had been threatening to visit the Wellington Museum for a while and we eventually got around to it the other day. We had been there before but it was a long time ago and I wanted to refresh my memory.

So, as you can imagine there are some interesting things to see here besides the usual mundane museum stuff. Here are some of the museumy things.

And these below are things that I found most interesting.

There is a lot of very interesting facts and history on this board about Wellington’s churches, blockhouses, the library, the Victoria Jubilee Park, the market and lots more.

The caption here with a picture of a pont crossing the Berg River in 1811 reads as follows;

“In the winter of 1836 silting of the Berg River prevented church members from Wamakersvallei (Wellington used to be called Wamakersvallei, meaning wagon builders valley.) from using the pont to reach their church in Paarl. Their desire for their own church would lead to the establishment of Wellington.

A part of the farm Champagne was sold for 63000 rix-dollars and divided into plots. Land surveyor A. L. Aling planned the town. The first plots were sold on 1st

February 1838. The town was proclaimed on 26 March 1840. Wellington was locally known as ‘Die Vlei’ (the marsh).”

This Prestik stained piece of paper tells quite a story.

Parts of the old wooden bridge

Lady Loch Bridge

Where the pont was is less than ½km from where I stay and the Lady Loch Bridge is one of my properties borders.

Lady Loch Bridge today

The caption above reads as follows;

“Captain James Sedgwick arrived in Cape Town on board the Undine in 1850. In 1886 he bought a distillery in Wellington. Today Sedgwick’s Old Brown Sherry and Three Ships Whisky, among others, are still produced here.”

The picture above is quite significant because the building still looks very much like this except for some big showroom windows downstairs where the local Ford dealership, Citrona Motors was. It is now an Autozone Spares Shop.

The caption of the Malan Wagon Builders, 1902 reads as follows;

“The wagon-building industry flourished during the diamond and gold rush and the Anglo-Boer War. The best-known wagon-building enterprise was that of A J Malan. In 1892 he erected a building on the corner of Church and Malan Streets, where wagons were built later. In 1945 Citrona Motors

opened on the site of the former Malan wagon builders.”

Across the bottom of the picture is another caption reading; “Johannes Marthinus Woudberg opened a tin and coppersmith shop in Bain Street in 1865. He manufactured copper pot-stills that were used to distil brandy and copper saucepans for Hugo’s Jam Factory. His descendants continued this

enterprise until 1956.”

The old dude in the picture above is the legendary Andrew Murray, he who sits and looks down Church Street from his spot outside the Dutch Reformed Church where he was the minister for 46 years.The caption reads as follows;

“Rev. Andrew Murray [1828 – 1917]. This well-known South African clergyman accepted a calling to the Wellington congregation in 1871. Here he lived and worked until his death on 17 January 1917. The title of the exhibition, “Het Liewe Wellington” (Beloved Wellington), is an expression he often used.”

Then we saw this and maybe there’s a family tie here somewhere as well.

Another fact worth noting is that the museum was 40 years old on 1st

December.

Wellington, by the way, was first called Val du Charron (valley of the wagon maker) by the French Huguenots who settled here and started building wagons, among other things, before changing to Wamakersvallei and then Wellington after the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon in the battle of Waterloo.

More trivia is that the local South African slang for bunking school is known as “stokiesdraai” and it originated right here in Wellington. This valley was and still is the nursery of the viticulture industry. In 1885 disaster struck the wine industry in the form of phylloxera, a microscopic aphid which virtually

wiped out vineyards throughout the world. A small pocket of vines in America were immune to phylloxera however because it was always present there and it became necessary to graft the desired cultivar of wine to the root-stock of these American vines. This process, done to this day on every single

vine in the world, was called stokiesdraai because once the root-stock was grafted to the cultivar, twine or raffia was wound around the wound to enable the two sticks to bind to each other.

During the season when this grafting was done the kids used to bunk school to get pocket money and when teachers asked them where they were the answer was, “Ek het stokiesgedraai”.

While we’re on the interesting subject of things that happened so long ago and still have some significance, there is another story which goes back to when the railway line was built in 1863. The route that the railway line took ran through the farm Versailles, owned by a Mr Malan, not the wagon

builder. Mr Malan generously donated the piece of land needed for the railway line and station on condition that all trains travelling through Wellington had to stop at the station. That tradition or agreement still stands today! So, with all this history I think it’s very good reason to live in this valley.

Until next time, “Keep on Tripping!”