Emmarentia
suburb of Johannesburg
Emmarentia (which usually encompasses Emmarentia Ridge and Emmarentia Ext. 1) is a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa.
History
Emmarentia lies on land that once made up the Braamfontein Farm, one of many large farms that make what is Johannesburg and its suburbs. The land was bought in 1886 by Lourens Geldenhuys for its mining rights as it was hoped that the Confidence Reef would extend into his farm but it did not. Land remained as a farm and by 1891 it was divided, along what is now Orange Road, between his son's Frans and Louw where the brothers had already built two farm houses. Frans' farmhouse still exists as the clubhouse at the Marks Park Sports Club and Louw's which exists close by at 14 Greenhill Road.
After the Second Boer War, in which Louw Geldenhuys and his brother had taken part of as members of the Krugersdorp Commando, he decided to help some landless and unemployed Boers war veterans. He used them to construct a stone and earth dam from blocks of stone from the Melville Koppies behind the farm and cost £12,000. The dam was built over the Westdene spruit which is a tributary of the larger Braamfontein Spruit. The dam was then named after his wife Emmarentia Margaretha Botha.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5373389. Authority coordinates are -26.156, 28.003. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886 and 1891.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emmarentia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.