Page 101 - Bulletin 19 2015

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that stood on the site of Muizenberg station. It was demolished when the railway line reached

the village in 1882 and the family then moved to a cottage that still stands opposite the station
at St. James. He built the Dutch Reformed Church in Kalk Bay (now the Kalk Bay Theatre)

in 1876, and financed much of its construction. Willie Auret, the son of Magdalena’s
daughter Susanna, grew up on the Silvermine farm. All the children on the farm were taught

in the loft of the house, and later went to the DRC school at Kalk Bay after the church had

been built. Willie Auret left the farm at the age of seventeen, becoming initially a whalerman
and fisherman like his grandfather, and died in Somerset West in 1987 at the age of 101.

Magdalena’s youngest son from her first marriage, Gerhardus van der Poll, and his wife
Maria de Villiers, lived in Die Kruithuis farmhouse in the 1890s, and five of their eight

children were born there. Gerhardus and Maria then bought the farm Brakkloof, in the Fish
Hoek Valley (south of the suburb Sun Valley). In 1900, during the Anglo-Boer War,

Gerhardus, who delivered produce by ox-wagon to the Boer prisoner-of-war encampment at
Simon’s Town, smuggled two Boer soldiers out of the camp. The following night he brought

them across from Brakkloof to the Silvermine farm, where the Kirstens hid them in the loft of

the barn. These two young soldiers managed to evade intensive searches by the British troops
and were hidden by the Aurets under the fishing nets on Muizenberg beach before being

taken up the west coast by boat from Gordon’s Bay. There they were able to reunite with the
Boer forces which had penetrated as far south as Namaqualand.

William and Magdalena Kirsten’s youngest son, Willem, and his wife Gertruida (Annie)

Pienaar, moved into Die Kruithuis farmhouse when they married in 1901, and Willem helped

his father on the farm. Magdalena and William Kirsten died soon after each other in 1902/3.
Prior to this, Magdalena’s eldest son, Barend van der Poll, had taken transfer of a 36 morgen

(31 hectares) subdivision of the lower part of the property, which became Farm 923. He built

a house, known as Die Kliphuis, for his family in 1904. (Figs. 2.30 & 2.31).

After William Kirsten’s death, the Silvermine farm, 925, was bought by Matthew Brown, and
two years later he sold it on to a German who had settled in the Cape, Adolph Koch. It

appears that Koch, who was a bookkeeper, did not live on the farm, but rented it out. In 1923
Koch leased Die Kruithuis farmhouse to Theodorus A. Smit, who was related to the first