The Walls We Trade In: Built From the Gold Rush Itself

Every piece we sell here has a story we go digging for — a maker, an era, a war, a workshop somewhere it passed through on its way to us. But there's one story we've never had to research, because we're standing inside it every single day.

The walls of this shop are corrugated iron, shipped from Britain in the closing years of the 1800s — exactly the kind of prefabricated iron building that defined South Africa's gold rush towns. Cheap to ship, quick to erect, and tough enough to outlast the boom-and-bust towns they were built for. Most of them didn't survive. Ours did.

1885: Gold, and a Man Named Leask

Gold was struck near Klerksdorp in November 1885, at almost exactly the same moment the far larger Witwatersrand reef was being discovered to the east. Thousands of hopeful diggers descended on what had, until then, been a quiet farming village on the banks of the Schoonspruit.

One of the men who paid attention was Thomas Leask — the same Thomas Leask whose 1871 trading post we've already told you about elsewhere on this site. Leask noticed a promising conglomerate while building a house in the area, had samples sent through to confirm the match against the Johannesburg reef, and began quietly taking out options on farms he suspected sat on the same seam. When the diggers arrived, Leask was already there, and he went on to chair the town's own stock exchange — a real one, trading real gold money, in a dusty new mining town that hadn't existed a year before.

Leask's own house still stands today, roughly 150 metres from where we're writing this — close enough that you could walk from his front door to ours in under two minutes. It's a strange thing, working this close to the man whose decisions shaped the town growing up around this exact street.

The town that sprang up around that discovery needed buildings, fast. Corrugated iron — light, portable, and importable by the shipload from Britain — was the answer. Whole structures arrived flat-packed and were bolted together on site, the same practical, no-nonsense engineering spirit that would later get romanticised into "steampunk" a century later. Except this wasn't romantic at the time. It was just how you built a town when gold fever moved faster than proper bricklaying ever could.

Edgar Darlington Chittenden

We went looking in the Deeds Office records for our own building's history — the same kind of digging we'd do for any piece in the shop — and the connection to Leask turned out to be closer than we'd realised. This exact plot was once part of Thomas Leask's own property, subdivided off and transferred to a Mr Edgar Darlington Chittenden on 21 April 1890. Chittenden held the property until 1917, and worked as a health inspector — not a gold speculator or a stock exchange chairman, just a working man doing an ordinary, useful job in a town still finding its feet.

The record itself has its own small story: it was requested from the Deeds Office by the Klerksdorp Museum on 12 October 1987, presumably by someone doing exactly what we're doing now — trying to understand what stood here, and who.

Two Generals on the Porch

Chittenden's ownership spanned one of the most consequential weeks in South African history. On 9 April 1902, Boer leaders from both republics gathered in Klerksdorp for the preliminary peace conference that set the terms for what would become the Treaty of Vereeniging six weeks later — the agreement that ended the Anglo-Boer War. The Boer delegation was housed with private citizens across the town, and this surviving photograph, held by the Klerksdorp Museum, shows two of them — Lucas Meyer and J.C. Krogh — standing on the porch of this very building. Both men would go on to sign the actual Treaty of Vereeniging that May.

It's a strange thing to know that men who helped end a war once stood on the same boards we walk across every day.

That's the part that gets us, honestly. We spend our days writing up the histories of pocket balances and swagger sticks and old paraffin stoves — objects that outlived their original owners and ended up, against fairly long odds, on a shelf in front of you. Turns out the ground under our feet has done exactly the same thing. Leask's land, Chittenden's shop, a war ending on this very porch, a museum's quiet research decades later — and now us, still asking the same questions in the same walls.

Why This Matters to Us

We didn't choose this building because it looked the part. We didn't dress up a modern space to look like a gold-rush relic — we just happen to trade out of a genuine one, on land that was once Thomas Leask's, held for 27 years by a health inspector named Chittenden, that briefly hosted two men who helped end a war, and was researched by a museum decades before we ever set foot in it. Every rivet in these walls is doing the same job it was shipped over to do more than 130 years ago. When we talk about honesty in what we sell — telling you what's original, what's been repaired, what's genuinely old versus what only looks it — it's worth knowing that same standard applies to the roof over our heads too.

Next time you're in, have a look at the walls. They were here before the gold ran out, before the stock exchange closed, before any of us. They'll probably be here after we're gone too.