Franklyn is a rural locality in the Mid North region of South Australia, situated in the Regional Council of Goyder.[3] It was established in August 2000, when boundaries were formalised for the "long established local name". It comprises the northern section of the cadastral Hundred of Wonna.[4] The name stems from a Franklyn House in Devonshire.[5]
Franklyn was surveyed as a government town in May 1880, but the town was formally declared to have ceased to exist on 9 February 1984.[4] Franklyn Post Office opened on 1 October 1883, was downgraded to a receiving office in January 1910, and closed on 9 July 1917.[6] A second post office, Pandappa Dam, operated in the south-east of the locality from 1 April 1883 until around 1908.[7][8] A school opened under the name of Wonna in 1883, was renamed Franklyn in 1886, and closed in 1916, while Pandappa Dam School opened in 1893 and closed in 1898.[5][9]
In October 1908, a correspondent to The Chronicle in Adelaide wrote that "there used to be a lot of people living here, but [...] it is very lonely now. There are only about a dozen families here, mostly farmers [...] and dairymen. We have a school and a church, however, so that we are not total barbarians. We also have a post-office, although we have only one mail a week."[10] In 1916, it was proposed to rename the town Wonna to avoid confusion with "Franklin", a subdivision in what is now the Adelaide suburb of Pennington, but this did not occur.[5][11]
^"Hallett Heritage Survey 1996"(PDF). Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources. Archived from the original(PDF) on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 8 February 2017.
^"SOMETHING ABOUT FRANKLYN". The Chronicle. Vol. LI, no. 2, 617. South Australia. 17 October 1908. p. 46. Retrieved 26 November 2016 – via National Library of Australia.