Groot Constantia Trail #7: The ‘Forgotten’ Years (Part 3)
This is the 7th cache of an 11-cache trail which will take you around this beautiful historic vineyard passing by most of its key features along the way.
The cache, a small camo-taped tablet pot, is hidden just off the oak-lined avenue which runs north-west at right angles to the axis of the main werf. It starts at the homestead forecourt, crosses an intersection with the circular road near the back of cellar, and extends up to the bathing pool.
The area on the left of the avenue was landscaped as an amphitheatre by Ian Ford in 1985. It offers views across to Muizenberg and the Production Cellar below. Events are rarely held here because of the risk of causing disturbance in a residential area
Forgotten Years (Continued from Part 2):
All in all, Johannes Colijn was a man of some substance when the new owner of Klein/Hoop op Constantia, Jan Jurgensz Cotze, died sometime before 1 May 1718 – the day on which Colijn married Cotze’s widow, Elsje van Hoff. And she, too, rather remarkably, was the daughter of a woman born into slavery around 1660, namely Margaretha Jans van de Caep, the halfslag (‘half-blood’ – having one white parent) daughter of Lijsbeth of Bengal and the vrijburgher Jan Coenraet Visser.
Having risen through the ranks to become the Slave Lodge’s first schoolmistress before her manumission (release from slavery) at legal majority (22), Margaretha married the Norwegian vrijburgher Lambart van Hoff in 1685. Her half-sister, moreover, was Maria Hendricks who in 1690 married Johannes Pfeiffer, an enormously wealthy holder of the wine pacht (among other lucrative monopolies). In her will of 13 April 1713, Hendricks named her niece Elsje as her universal heir, which no doubt added to the Constantia widow’s extreme eligibility – and Colijn was the man she chose.
Sadly, she died sometime before 23 September 1724, when Colijn (who inherited Klein/Hoop op Constantia with step-son ‘Jan Coetsie’) married his 2nd wife, Johanna Appel, the daughter of Ferdinandus Appel and Levina Cloete.
Johanna was the 1st cousin of Hendrik Cloete, the man who would purchase Groot Constantia for just 60,000 guilders in 1778 (2 years after Colijn’s son, Johannes Nicolaas, purchased Klein/Hoop op Constantia ‘very cheaply from his parents’ for 61,680 guilders – a real bargain since Groot was 5 times larger than Klein/Hoop).
A lot had happened in the meantime – starting with the ‘coloured’ Colijn siblings as master and mistress, respectively, of the two celebrated Constantia vineyards – but from 1778, Colijns and Cloetes farmed alongside each other.
They both produced the world-famous Constantia wine, right through British occupation (when the authorities recorded how much more co-operative Mr Colyn was with supplying Constantia wine than the ‘morose, uncouth, and churlish’ Mr Cloete with his ‘groundless representations’) and the glory years, until both families were declared bankrupt (in 1857 and 1872 respectively).
See here for a blog page on Simon vd Stel and The Constantia Wine and for a here for a summary of the numerous historical divisions and owners of the constituents of the Constantia Estate.
