| Summary: | Shelter forms part of the means of maintaining
oneself within a landscape. Temporary forms of
shelter often develop into a house, as a more
permanent form of shelter. Once the house has
taken form, it also acts as a sign of a foothold on
the landscape from where influence can be
furthered. A farmhouse is a part of that tradition
but agriculturally based. A farmstead usually
includes the most important house on the farm and
its associated structures. It forms the centre from
where control is exercised over a demarcated part
of the landscape, which is the farm. Early
farmhouses are therefore associated with a series
of ideas like settlement, social interaction, control,
ownership, farms, farmsteads, houses and shelter.
These ideas are viewed conceptually differently by
different cultures. Within a culture the ideas
change as time goes by and are influenced on the
most basic level by the resources found in the
landscape. This study endeavors to collect and document the
physical evidence of the early farmhouses in the
Brandwater Basin area. It is a vernacular
architecture particular to the Eastern Free State,
unified by the use of the sandstone that is available
on the landscape as building material. The
collection is limited to houses built before the end
of the Orange River Colony in 1910. The
architectural development that followed on the
initial structures is also considered. The purpose of
this study is to extend knowledge of this critical
phase of the development of the area. It is the
phase in which a new tradition was introduced to
the area, which up to this day forms the basis on
which control over the physical landscape is
regulated.
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