Yorketown
Postcode: 5576
Yorketown is the largest town (population 1000) in southern Yorke Peninsula, in South Australia. It is most famous for its Cornish pasties and “Y” shaped bar.
Located 230 km west of Adelaide, Yorketown is a small rural service centre which is literally surrounded by saltpans. The area around Yorketown was settled in the late 1840s by a group of farmers eager to exploit the region’s grain growing potential. They planted crops of barley and wheat and grazed sheep. By 1872, even though the size of the community was still very small, the town was laid out and blocks of land were sold. In this year the Melville Hotel was completed and by 1876 the attractive Yorke Hotel and the Methodist Church had both been completed. The extraordinary number of salt lakes in the area persuaded a local wit to advocate that the town be renamed Salt Lake City but it failed to capture the local imagination. The town still bears the name of the surveyor who laid it out in 1872.