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The establishment of the railway had necessitated the stationing of
its permanent staff at the stations in the Lowveld. A small police staff had also become necessary. Other than these officials there were almost no other people in this region. The mining and agricultural communities around Barberton and Pilgrim's Rest occupied only the higher lying land where malaria did not exist or occured
seasonaly and sporadically.
Prior to the Anglo-Boer War, Mr. H.L. Hall, who had been engaged in transport riding, settled down to farming at Nelspruit, though it was to take him many years to realize that the agricultural value of the Lowveld lies in its proximity, as a sub-tropical area, to the temparate Highveld, and the consequent possibility for delivery at economic rates of sub-tropical fruits and winter-grown vegetables to markets of the interior towns.
The coming of the Anglo-Boer War caused all development in the Transvaal to cease; but its termination left
the nucleas of a new population in the Lowveld, drawn from officers and men of the Imperial Forces, who decided to make the Lowveld their home. Amongst these was Capt. G. J. Elphick, who had been a Railway Staff Officer in the Lowveld during the war. He took up and commenced farming operations entailing pioneer work of the most strenuous kind. Every acre he cultivated had to be cleared of bush, and a totally new farming techique developed.
Cattle were unobtainable, and the day of the petrol-driven tractor was still far off, so Elphick bought a steam tractor at Middleburg and
he himself drove it down over the appalling roads and tracks of those days to Malelane, thus introducing the first form of mechanisation to the Lowveld.
He planted cotton and established his own gin, thus pioneering the cotton-growing industry of the Lowveld. The venture was successful until the natural pests of cotton, indigenous to the Lowveld, and principally the jassid hopper and the cotton borer insect multiplied on this new food source to such an extent that as to destroy its utility. It was not until the British Empire Cotton Growers Corporation established a research station in Barberton that the development of a jassid-proof strain of cotton and other methods of research placed cotton on a sure footing as a Lowveld crop.
To Capt. Elphick, too, is due the credit for the first attempt to grow papaws in the Lowveld as a commercial fruit crop in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Throughout these small beginnings of the agricultural industry in the region, the
shadow of malaria still hung heavily over the land, and the early pioneers carried their lives and their health in their hands. The spreading knowledge of the method of transmission of malaria and the produciton of mosquito-proof gauze led to the screening of houses. There was much, however, to be said for the belief of the old timers, that the screening of a house made it a death-trap; for mosquitoes could not be entirely kept out, and once inside the house they were most effectively kept in and could not fail to become infected and act as a vector of malaria. It was not until the discovery of the earlier forms of contact insecticides such as Flit, Komo and Pyagra-Spray that it became possible to destroy the mosquitoes in the houses. Even by that means some escaped and it remained for the discovery during the second world war of the residual insecticides such as D.D.T. to render mosquito-screened houses safe.
The railway however, facilitated entry into the Lowveld and the attraction of game for hunting bought visitors to the Lowveld during the innocuous winter season; the knowledge of the country so gained, added to the fertility of the land and abundance of water supplies, combined with the low price at which the Government was prepared to allocate land to bona-fide settlers, led to a gradual infiltration of new farmers.
An attempt was made at organized settlement under Government auspices at White River, but notwithstanding the provision of adequate irrigation works, the government settlement was practically a failure, and finally the balance of the settlement area was turned over to private enterprise. In 1926 White River was connected to Nelspruit by rail. By that time the settlement had begun to prosper, and it has since then progressed by leaps and bounds.
One of the first important tasks of the Komati Agricultural Association was to attempt and finally persuade a reluctant Government to introduce the compulsory dipping of cattle in the whole of the Barberton district, then including the present district of Nelspruit. That measure operated strongly towards local development for it was essential to the success of agriculture in the Lowveld.
Just as the attack of rinderpest in 1896 had proved to be a blessing in disguise, so South Africa had in the early years of the twentieth century received another heavily disguised blessing, in the form of East Coast Fever, first called Texas Fever, because it was believed that it was introduced into South Africa by cattle imported from Texas at the end of the Anglo-Boer War. Just as it had been discovered that malaria is transmitted as a blood parasite by means of the mosquito, in which discovery the bacteriologist Dr. Koch had taken a leading part so Dr. Koch discovered that East Coast Fever is transmitted between cattle as blood parasites (still known as as Kock's bodies) by means of the blue tick, and just as the discovery in the case of malaria had led to war on the mosquito, so did this discovery lead to war against the tick.
That insect was, however, responsible for far more than the transmission of East Coast Fever. The bite of one type transmits heartwater in cattle, not as deadly as East Coast Fever, but still the cause of death of many cattle. The loss of blood and irritation of tick bite is in itself serious, and even when East Coast Fever was not present, the morality of calves in the Lowveld was around 60%. It was uncommon to find a cow with all her teats intact, or an ox with ears not crumpled by tick bites. The introduction of compulsory dipping not only combated East Coast Fever, but it provided a powerful weapon against ticks in general. It had not succeeded in eliminating all ticks, but it has rendered the Lowveld a fair country for ranching, and made its excellent grazing available for maintain large heards of cattle.
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