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Discovery channel iron wars4/6/2023 By this time it had been realized that the Reef extended not only to the east and west, but also downwards with persisting values of ore. By then 14 mines and 93 stamps were in operation, with a total annual output of 19,080 oz of gold.īy the end of the following year, in 1888, the number of companies had dropped down to 39, only to rise up again to 52 by the end of 1889. The first of these to be erected was a three-stamp Sandycroft on the Jubilee Mine, which came into operation on 22 April of that year, and by the end of 1887 it had been followed into production by the Wemmer, Ferreira, Salisbury, Wits (Knights), Meyer & Charlton, George Goch, Jumpers, City and Suburban, Geldenhuis Estates, Langlaagte, Robinson and Wolhouter mines. The first crushing battery, consisting of five stamps, had been erected on the Reef in 1885 to service the Struben's excavations on the lower West Rand reef, but this was a small operation, and the first crushing machinery ordered specifically for the new Reef diggings began to arrive from the coast in 1887. On 14 September 1886, the first large mining company on the Reef, the Witwatersrand Gold Mining Company, was formed with a total nominal capital of £3,063,000. Thus, initially at any rate, life in the new mining town was one of uncertainty and, for a number of years many of its early buildings retained their prefabricated iron-and-timber character. Even after it was realised that the gold reef ran both deep and wide, and the introduction in May 1890 of the MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process made recovery of gold excavated at deep levels economically feasible, the general consensus of the time was that Johannesburg's life span would not exceed 25 years. As a result, the initial survey and layout of the settlement was made with impermanence in mind. ![]() ![]() ![]() However, these diggings had also been largely alluvial in nature and, despite the fact that ore deposits on the new reef seemed to be both concentrated and of a long life expectancy, the Government took the view that Johannesburg would be no different from any of the other gold mining villages which had preceded it. In the case of all other gold discoveries made previously in the Transvaal, deposits had invariably proved to have a short working life, so the concentrations of people they stimulated were equally short lived. The sub-division of what became the settlement's central district was a typical product of nineteenth century mining camp planning. Following upon the declaration of Johannesburg, this area was taken over by the Government who had it surveyed and named it Ferreira’s Town. The original miners' camp, under the informal leadership of Col Ignatius Ferreira, had been located in the Fordsburg dip, possibly because water was available there, and because of the site's close proximity to the diggings. The first building plots were subdivided and sold by public auction two months later, on 8 December. However Randjeslaagte, the site of present-day central Johannesburg, was not declared until 4 October 1886, and its village was only officially named ‘Johannesburg’ for the first time the previous day, 3 October 1886. ![]() Before long open cast workings were being opened up along the full length of the main reef in the present district of Johannesburg.īy August 1886, the mining camp, as yet unnamed, could already boast of some 3000 inhabitants, most of them White, and on 8 September of that year nine farms, located in what is now regarded as the central Rand, were proclaimed public diggings. However, these were minor reefs, and today it is the general consensus that credit for the discovery of the main gold reef must be attributed to George Harrison, whose findings on the farm Langlaagte were made in July 1886, either through accident or systematic prospecting. The first recorded discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand was made by Jan Gerrit Bantjes in June 1884, on the farm Vogelstruisfontein, and was followed soon thereafter, in September, by the Struben brothers who uncovered the Confidence Reef on the farm Wilgespruit, near present-day Roodepoort.
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