The town grew around a station originally named Geluk, after the sheep farm it was built on, but in 1894 the name was changed to honour the Portuguese Major Joachim Machado, an engineer who had surveyed the land for the proposed Nelspruit-Delagoa Bay railway line through the Crocodile River gorge. The settlement became a capital for a few months from 5 June 1900, but was only declared a municipal town in 1904. This quirk in history happened during the Second Boer War when the TransvaalVolksraad made the town their temporary seat, using railway carriages as their offices and mint after they had to evacuate Pretoria in the face of a British invasion. A quick-thinking station master rescued a consignment of dying trout by dumping the fish in the Elands River, which formed the start of the town's subsequent role in Mpumalanga's trout tourism industry. With the demise of passenger trains in South Africa, the once-postcard-pretty station closed in 2001 and it is now a derelict ruin. In the 21st century, Machadodorp's residents either work for the industries feeding a chrome smelter, or the logging industries based on the pine plantations surrounding the town. A large contingent of contract workers employed at the Nkomati mine about an hour's drive out of town also reside in Machadodorp, contributing a large part of the town's economy. The Komati Gorge, notable for its considerable biodiversity and bluff habitats, forms a backdrop to the town.
Name change
In early 2010 the town had its name officially changed. The town was renamed from Machadodorp to eNtokozweni, meaning Place of Happiness. It is often still referred to as Machadodorp despite the name change.
baKoni ruins
The hills around the town are terraced with thousands of stone walls which form part of a vast complex of settlements, fields and roads. Some tour guides describe these as South Africa's "real" lost city. Archaeologists and historians have described the ruins as settlements of the baKoni people. Oral records and historical evidence trace the baKoni to at least the early 18th century. The ongoing 500 Year Initiative to rewrite South Africa's history continues to deliver new insights into the extent and complexity of these settlements. An international group of researchers have placed the baKoni settlements in the context of numerous other cases of agricultural intensification, that took place in the precolonial era in different parts of Africa.
