Uniondale Favorites

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Favorite thing: Settlements began in the Uniondale around 6,000 years ago, when the San people rested and lived in the many caves in the local Table Mountain sandstone that overlook the narrow deep valleys. There are many sites in the area where San rock art survives today. But little is known of the area until it was settled by European farmers in the nineteenth century. In 1856, two townships were laid out next to each other by a local farmer, one called Hopedale and the other Lyonville. The two extended to within a few tens of metres from each other, but the people of each other argued over a single name for the town. Then in 1862, the Dutch Reformed Church decided to build a church between the two and named the spot Uniondale, so settling the name for the town. The area remained a farming backwater, but quietly prosperity came with the popularity of ostrich feathers in the Art Nouveau movement in Europe and especially American fashion as the whole of the Little Karoo area is suitable for ostrich farming. Being light, the feathers were easy to carry over the narrow Swartberg mountain pass to the railway station at Port Albert, north of Oudtshoorn.
In the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, the British army and the local Town Guards built a fort above the town and at fort other sites aroundabouts, and a brief battle was fought for Uniondale: although a local Boer Commando leader captured three of the town's notables, he was later executed above the craggy yellow cliffs of Uniondalepoort to the south of town ? a small memorial has been erected to him just by the De Hoop turn-off.
In 1913, Fran?ois Krige was born in Uniondale; his father was the clerk to the court here. Krige was a significant artist, and was a war artist. He grew up in the area, and never tired of the wide open spaces of the Little Karoo, and it is perhaps ironic that having been born at its far eastern end, he died in 1994 at the far western end in the town of Montagu, where a gallery is devoted to his work.