Cadastral map of the town of Port Vincent in South Australia - located on Yorke Peninsula on the coast of Gulf St. Vincent. Shows blocks to be auctioned.

The blocks were auctioned 12 September 1877: 65 of the 101 allotments were sold. Allotment 1, adjacent to the jetty, was sold for 300 pounds. The town's hotel was built on the land and has remained ever since. Allotments A-J along the beach on Marine Parade were not sold. Subsequent to the auction private sales of the unsold land began. Sales were not brisk but most had been sold by December 1879. However, buyers were not quick to use or occupy their land and much of it stood vacant as late as 1910.

The Government Reserve is Surveyor's Point where the original survey of 1839 was begun. It is now occupied by a caravan park. In 1839 the Adelaide Survey Association arranged to survey two towns on Yorke Peninsula: Port Vincent and Port Victoria. Neither survey resulted in land being taken up, in part because of the economic conditions in South Australia in the early 1840s and also because the quality of the soil and the lack of surface water were disincentives. Then in 1854 three blocks of land facing the bay comprising 737 acres were sold freehold; some of which were sown to wheat. This sale meant that a government survey for a town could not be made at Port Vincent when the official surveys of Hundreds and towns commenced on southern Yorke Peninsula in 1869. Port Vincent would face future problems because of this private survey.

All the government towns from Arthurton to Minlaton used a basic plan of a grid of streets surrounded by a belt of parkland: this was an adaptation of Colonel Light's plan for Adelaide, adjusted for local conditions. The parklands were used by the towns for playing fields, schools and other amenities. Port Vincent lacked this parkland belt, and its parks and reserves are scattered across the town on land either donated by generous landowners as further sub-division occurred, or using land freed from other activities such as grain storage for the port, or a disused fuel depot.

Jones, Alan Port Vincent: shipping port to pleasure resort Port Vincent, S. Aust.: Port Vincent Progress Association, 1994

Cork, Frank E. 'Port Vincent: jewel of Peninsula Coast', Progress in Australia, vol. 7, no. 8 (December 1936), p. 16-17

Porter, J. R. The priceless gift - an ordered land: a brief history of the early surveying of South Australia [Adelaide?: Institution of Surveyors?, 1986?]