Page 103 - Bulletin 19 2015

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owner of Farm 925 in 1808, Francois Smit. The Smit family then moved to the main house

and improved it by replacing rotten flooring and adding porches over the doors to keep out
the rain. Koch died in 1937 and left the Silvermine farm to his three daughters in Germany.

Theodorus Smit’s sons were keen to buy the farm, and it appears that Koch’s daughters had
signed the relevant documents, but they were lost at sea en route back to South Africa when

the ship transporting them was sunk, probably at the beginning of World War II. Eventually

three of Theodorus’ sons, Andries, Wynand and Benjamin Smit, were able to take transfer of
the farm years in 1951, six years after the end of the war.

In the early 1960s the upper section of the farm on the southern slopes of Bokkop Peak was
expropriated for the construction of the Ou Kaapse Weg, and the mountainside above the

road was incorporated into the Silvermine Nature Reserve. This expropriation represented
some 66% of the original Farm 922, and in 1967 the remainder, 90 morgen (77 hectares) in

the upper portion of the valley, was subdivided off the main farm. It was sold to a group
which returned the property to its natural state and ran it as the Sunbird Nature Reserve.

(Figs. 2.32 & 2.33.)

Meanwhile, Farm 923, the lower part of the original farm that had been sold to Barend van

der Poll in 1901, had been sold to Hendrik Punt on Van der Poll’s death in 1933. Six years
later it was sold to his cousins Wilhelm and Carl Punt. The Punt family were prominent

vegetable farmers in the Philippi area of the Cape Flats.

On the Silvermine farm, 925, the Smit sons repaired Die Kruithuis farmhouse in the late

1940s as a retirement home for their father Theodorus. A new corrugated iron roof and
suspended wooden floors were installed. He was the last resident of the house, and when he

died in 1950, his funeral was the last to be held in the DR Church in Kalk Bay, built by

Abraham Auret. Theodorus had twelve children, and when his youngest son Benjamin (a
biblical name from Jacob’s twelfth son), married in 1959, the brothers built a house for him

behind the Silvermine homestead. At the same time, sanitation was installed in the main
house, but a generator was retained to produce electricity.