Rickety Bridge - Going back to 1830. In that year the farm was owned by Catharina, the widow Pepler, and when her son married Catharina's second cousin, the twenty year old Paulina de Villiers, Catharina installed them in the newly built manor house with its built in wall cabinet that still graces the ‘voorkamer’ in thee picture.

The marriage was a family affair and Paulina and the Peplers could both trace ancestry back to Jacques de Villiers, one of the three original immigrant Huguenot brothers. Palina had two children and enjoyed the manor house for only six years before dying at her father's farm.

What was Paulina like? 

No pictures have come to light. Since she died in 1836 at the age of twenty six, one assumes she was not particularly robust and a picture of a frail beauty comes to mind. Paulina did have two children however, so frailty seems inappropriate.

Her death certificate records only that she died at Groot Drakenstein but the law required it to be signed by ‘a close relative, who had been present at, or near the persons death or, in the absence of such, by the person who shall have chief charge of the house in, or of the place on which, the death took place’.

It is Paulina’s father, Paul, who signed the certificate bu t it makes no mention of whether she was thrown from a horse, or if she had gone to her mother to be nursed.

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