Boksburg’s story begins with the Voortrekkers crossing the Vaal River into the country that would become the Transvaal. Their first permanent settlement, Potchefstroom, was established on the Mooi River in November 1838.
The Voortrekkers had left the Cape Colony between 1835 and 1840 for reasons that belong to the wider history of southern Africa. What concerns Boksburg is what they found north of the Vaal.
The land was not empty. The Highveld had been shaped over the previous decade by the Mfecane — a period of violent displacement set in motion by the rise of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka. The Ndebele king Mzilikazi, a former Zulu induna who had broken away from Shaka, had carved out his own empire across the western and central Transvaal. The Voortrekkers’ arrival was contested. A series of engagements between 1836 and 1837 — most famously the wagon-laager battle at Vegkop — broke Ndebele power south of the Limpopo, and Mzilikazi withdrew across the river to establish a new kingdom at Bulawayo in what is now Zimbabwe.
Other Voortrekker parties had gone north-east into Natal rather than north into the Highveld; after the British annexation of Natal in 1843, most of them trekked back over the Drakensberg, joining the Highveld settlements.
By the late 1850s the Transvaal had grown into four separate Boer communities, each with its own Volksraad. Potchefstroom in the west, already established by 1838, was the largest and most settled. Lydenburg in the eastern escarpment was founded in 1849 by survivors of the malarial Andries-Ohrigstad attempt of 1845; the name “place of suffering” memorialised the Ohrigstad dead. Schoemansdal in the far north (originally Zoutpansbergdorp, founded 1848, renamed in 1855) was unusual among Voortrekker towns because its economy was based on elephant hunting and ivory rather than farming — the Soutpansberg was tsetse-fly country and unsuitable for cattle. It was abandoned in 1867 under pressure from the Venda chief Makhado. Utrecht on the Natal-Zulu-Transvaal border was the smallest, established as a Boer republic in 1856 on land obtained from the Zulu king Mpande two years earlier in exchange for cattle.
The four communities consolidated as the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek between 1857 and 1860, with Pretoria (established 1855 and named after Andries Pretorius) as the capital.
In 1865 a group of farming families on the southern Highveld agreed to establish their own administrative seat. Their farms had been part of the Potchefstroom magisterial district since the early Voortrekker years, and the 150 kilometres across the veld to Potchefstroom was no longer practical for routine landdrost and church business. The ZAR capital at Pretoria was closer, but each magisterial district had its own seat — the southern Highveld remained Potchefstroom’s responsibility.
They bought a portion of the farm Langlaagte from Hendrik Ueckermann and laid out a town around a central kerkplein. They named it Heidelberg, after the German city that gave its name to the Heidelberg Catechism. The new town became the seat of the Heidelberg district — the administrative slice of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek that contained much of the southern Highveld.
The farms that would become Boksburg — Leeuwpoort, Vogelfontein, Driefontein and others — were Heidelberg-district farms. From 1865 to 1887, ZAR-era documents about these farms reference the Heidelberg landdrost, not Pretoria.
Then, in 1886, gold was found on a farm also called Langlaagte — not the Heidelberg one, but another farm of the same name on the western Witwatersrand, in what is now Johannesburg. Within months, geological investigation revealed the full extent of the Main Reef, running east-west across the Witwatersrand and continuing through the northern part of the Heidelberg district — through the country around Boksburg, Benoni, Brakpan and Springs.
On 10 March 1887, the Boer government proclaimed the township of Boksburg on the farm Vogelfontein, named for Willem Eduard Bok, the State Secretary of the ZAR. A landdrost was appointed an with that proclamation, Boksburg had become a town.