Images courtesy Google Earth.
Building the Retirement Village
It may be of interest to know that the Village was launched in June 2013 with the initial show houses and the first occupation took place in August 2014.
Nine million bricks, 12,400 cubes of sand and 62,000 tiles were used to complete the development.
The civil work included building 4,5km of retaining walls, the highest of which is over 7 meters tall.
To clear the site required 16,000 cubes of rock blasting and 110000 cubes of ground were removed from the site. It makes one realise the enormity of the task of constructing our village.
(Thanks to Brian Appleton, extract from Olive's News October 2015)
History of the site:
The township of Olivedale - part of Olievenshoutpoort - was developed on the Amsterdam Estate which was established in 1943 by Mr. H. Messias, a diamond dealer who emigrated from Holland before the Second World War. He established a free range chicken farm and planted an orchard of 50,000 peach trees. His house and surrounding structures where built by Italian prisoners of war who were obtained from Zonderwater prisoner of war camp.
Irrigation was established for the peach trees from a borehole which required a source of power. What could be more appropriate to a native of Holland than a Dutch Windmill. The Italians constructed the windmill using a magazine picture as their guide. This windmill was declared a national monument in 1989 and is located a few kilometres from our village (can be seen at 22 Patrick Street, Olivedale - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Olivedale_Windmill.JPG )
The actual ground where the Olivedale Retirement Village (ORV) has been built was inherited in the mid-sixties by Margaret Constance Matthews, a New Zealander by birth, from her sister, Mrs Thurlow. Margaret lived by herself and farmed a small herd of cattle and a quantity of chickens. The cowsheds and milking parlour where situated where today stands the guard control room at the Village entrance. Milk was supplied to Douglasdale Dairy which was owned by one of her four sons, Brian. She began restoration of many old houses that were on the property, which were later lived in by family members. Margaret constructed a scenic dam to attract birds to the area.
Margaret Matthews died in 1993 and is buried next to a family member Claire who dies at the age of six. They are buried in a small cemetery located just outside the main entrance of our retirement.
The developers of ORV purchased the land from the Matthews family in 2010 and began construction of the village in 2013. We look forward as residents to writing our own chapter in the Olivedale history books.
(Thanks to Brian Appleton, published in Olive’s News, June 2015).
Images courtesy Malcolm Fox & Google Earth
