Most people are familar with Douglasdale (the suburb and the famous milk brand of course) but who was the Douglas in Douglasdale? Below are a few excerpts from the 1980 journal of the Sandton Historical Association answering this question.
Douglasdale is situated in the north of the municipality of Sandton, west of Bryanston and just south of Fourways, with the western boundary following the Klein Jukskei river.
Since local history is the story of the land and the people who live on it, there are two stories to be told - that of 'Douglas', the man, and 'Dale', the place. Both stories, strangely enough, began around the middle of the last century - one in a small Scottish town, and the other in what were then the bleak uninhabited areas of the Transvaal, between Potchefstroom and Pretoria in the days before gold was discovered and when Johannesburg itself did not exist. [This article will tell the story of Douglas the man]
It was in 1859, on July 26th, that the original farm Witkoppen was granted by land grant from President Kruger to P.E. Labuschagne and on July 5th of the same year that Driefontein 3 was granted to L.P. van Vuuren, and these land grants can be seen today in Pretoria, although the farms have now all been considerably sub-divided. Not long after, in the year 1863, Thomas Douglas, one of a family of five, was born in the small town of Stranraer in Wigtownshire, Scotland.
Thomas Douglas left Scotland...
