Gradings

Vergelegen possesses high historical value associated with the first decade of the 18th Century, when the Cape of Good Hope was an emerging victualling station of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) servicing the Dutch commercial empire's maritime trade routes with the east, linking Europe, Africa and the East Asia. Vergelegen likely originated as a VOC outstation, one of a number positioned to control its trade interest between Table Bay and the hinterland. Vergelegen has strong associations with VOC officialdom, conceived under the ownership of the high ranking VOC official, William Adriaan van der Stel, Governor at the Cape between 1699 and 1706, having succeeded his farther Simon van der Stel as Governor (1679-1699), thus extending the influential van der Stel era of the VOC at the Cape spanning almost three decades.

Vergelegen is one of the earliest examples of an idealised farmstead established at the Cape, influenced by European principles of a grand country estate, it predates the development of a rural vernacular at the Cape occurring later in the 18th Century and the grand estate later developed by the emerging prosperous free burghers. Vergelegen epitomises the development of traditional rural agrarian land-use and settlements of Cape colonial farmers and the basis for a region-specific vernacular architecture on which other frums at the Cape and beyond were later modelled.

Vergelegen is strongly associated with the history of slavery at the Cape with van der Stel owning more than 200 slaves, the most ever in private hands on one property at the Cape. Of special historical interest in the use of Vergelegen as a place of exile for the Rajah of Tambora associated with the use of the Cape of Good Hope as an official place of confinement for eastern political prisoners of rank of the VOC and his role in transcribing the Koran, possibly the first hand written Koran at the Cape.