Penfield is a northern suburb of

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

, in the

City of Playford The City of Playford is a local government area of South Australia in Adelaide's northern suburbs. It was named in recognition of Sir Thomas Playford, who played a part in the development of the area, and was South Australia's premier from 1938 ...

. William Penfold, one of the first settlers in the area, subdivided land he had bought in the

Hundred of Munno Para The Hundred of Munno Para is a cadastral unit of hundred covering the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide north of the Little Para River and the flanking semi-rural areas in South Australia. It is one of the eleven hundreds of the County of Adelai ...

in 1856 to create the

township A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, Ca ...

of Penfield. The area was commonly known as Peachey Belt or Peachy Belt. The boundaries have changed over the years, the original township being overshadowed by the government acquisition of land immediately south of the early town centre since the 1940s for construction of military facilities such as the Penfield munitions factory. As a result, much of the modern peri-urban locality of Penfield is used for industrial purposes rather than residential and the original town centre is no longer a population centre. The remaining part of the Zoar Bible Christian Church, built in 1855, is the small cemetery.

History

Before European settlement, the

Kaurna people The Kaurna people (, ; also Coorna, Kaura, Gaurna and other variations) are a group of Aboriginal people whose traditional lands include the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. They were known as the Adelaide tribe by the early settlers. Kaurna ...

inhabited the land. The district was surveyed in 1849, as part of the

. Early settlers arrived in the area in the 1850s, clearing the land to grow cereal crops and graze animals. William Friend Penfold was one of the first to buy land there, and in 1853 he opened the Plough and Harrow Hotel (which closed in 1893 and was destroyed by fire in 1899). In 1856 he subdivided land he had bought on section 4057, and a village was laid out at the junction of Penfield and Argent Roads (the Argents being another family of early settlers). That intersection is now surrounded on three sides by

RAAF Base Edinburgh RAAF Base Edinburgh is a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) military airbase located in Edinburgh approximately north of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia and forms part of the Edinburgh Defence Precinct. The base is primarily home to No 9 ...

. Most of the settlers were converted over to the

Bible Christian Church The Bible Christian Church was a Methodist denomination founded by William O’Bryan, a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher, on 18 October 1815 in North Cornwall. The first society, consisting of just 22 members, met at Lake Farm in Shebbear, ...

Methodist Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's b ...

denomination) by Reverend Samuel Keen of Angle Vale. The Zoar Bible Christian Church was built in 1855, which was demolished in 1956, although the small cemetery remains. (It is near the Max Fatchen Expressway, accessed from Argent Road or the Stuart O'Grady Bikeway.) In the early years, the village had two general stores, a police station, the church and the hotel. Penfield Post Office opened around 1856 and closed in 1951. A government school was opened in 1874 and remained open until about 1940. Another church, Sturton

Primitive Methodist The Primitive Methodist Church is a Methodist Christian denomination with the holiness movement. It began in England in the early 19th century, with the influence of American evangelist Lorenzo Dow (1777–1834). In the United States, the Primiti ...

Church was further south, and the building still stands in the RAAF property, visible from Sturton Road. Two possibilities as to the origin of the area's former name, Peachey (or Peachy) Belt, which persisted until 1858, have been suggested: that it came from the native peach trees, or

quandong Quandong, quandang or quondong, is a common name for the species '' Santalum acuminatum'' (desert, sweet, Western quandong), especially its edible fruit, but may also refer to * '' Aceratium concinnum'' (highroot quandong) * '' Peripentadenia mea ...

s, which covered the area; or that the surveyor was Peter Peachey and the name came from him. A report in ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

'' on 10 November 1859, from a meeting in Peachey Belt, mentions a dinner given by

James Philcox James Philcox (22 January 1812 – 31 March 1893) was an English land speculator and property developer in the 1840s and 1850s in the colony of South Australia. He is credited with naming the inner eastern Adelaide suburb of Marryatville as well a ...

(a land speculator who named Evanston) at "Smidt's Hotel" before his departure from the colony in 1853. It is not clear whether this referred to the Plough and Harrow or another hotel in the wider area. The report says that Philcox had urged his 13 tenants to turn their attention to the cultivation of

vineyard A vineyard (; also ) is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. The science, practice and study of vineyard production is known as viticulture. Vineyards ...

s. A large amount of land in the area between Penfield and Salisbury was compulsorily acquired by the

Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government i ...

Department of Munitions The Department of Munitions was an Australian government department that existed between 11 June 1940 and April 1948. Reporting to it was the Factory Board, which was in charge of the six Small Arms Ammunition Factories, along with a ...

in 1940 to establish a

munitions Ammunition (informally ammo) is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines) and the component parts of other weap ...

factory, the

Salisbury Explosives Factory Edinburgh is an outer northern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia in the City of Salisbury. The suburb was created in 1997, on land straddling Penfield and Salisbury, that was compulsorily acquired by the Commonwealth Government in 1940 in ord ...

, during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. It led to the closure of the Penfield village. That site now includes

, Defence Science and Technology Group and industrial premises.

21st century

The boundaries have varied several times before the current precise boundaries were set. In the 2010s, the eastern part of what was then Penfield was developed for residential housing. On 31 October 2017, this section was excised from Penfield and a new suburb of Eyre was created on the north side of Womma Road and western side of Stebonheath Road. The western part is mostly an industrial area wrapped around the northern sides of

and south of the Max Fatchen Expressway. It includes an intermodal freight terminal on the Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line operated by

SCT Logistics SCT Logistics is an Australian interstate transport company operating rail and road haulage, with facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Parkes, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. History SCT Logistics was founded in 1974 as Specialised Container Tran ...

with a large warehouse and distribution centre operated for

Treasury Wine Estates Treasury Wine Estates is an Australian global winemaking and distribution business with headquarters in Melbourne. It was formerly the wine division of international brewing company Foster's Group. History Background Treasury Wine Estates traces ...

References

{{City of Playford suburbs Suburbs of Adelaide

History

21st century

See also

References