Founding the Village
In 1854 Herbert Vigne founded a freehold agricultural village on his farm Weltevreden. He kept two small portions for himself and bequeathed the remainder of the farm to the proprietors of the erven as commonage, naming it "GREYTON", after Sir George Grey, the then Governor of the Cape. The layout of the village was designed and set out by J G Rietz, a senior surveyor at the time. The layout remains essentially the same with only a few changes and additions through the years. In the 1860s Herbert married a young girl of British stock named Elizabeth Belshaw - 27 years his junior! They settled on their town farm De Bos, in the village (subsequently subdivided by his heirs after his death in 1895). Elizabeth bore him a legitimate family of three sons and a daughter to add to the illegitimate offspring of his younger days, whom he was to acknowledge in the village. Vigne Lane was later named after him.
The erven were long and narrow and were serviced with water running in "leiwater" furrows, which crisscrossed the village. Cottages, in the rural Cape Vernacular style, were built close to the street leaving large pieces of the erven for horticultural pursuits. The produce consisted of a variety of vegetables and fruits such as onions, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, beetroot, carrots, pomegranate, apricots, pears and the like.
Although the reason for the establishment of the village remains obscure, the fact is that Herbert Vigne left us with a village of unsurpassed beauty and enchantment. It is a wonder that the essence of the village and its Cape Vernacular architectural environment are largely intact and that the out-of-context and unresponsive development that has destroyed so many small towns of the Cape has up to now passed Greyton by.