Recent DNA studies and examinations of floral ontogeny in the Theaceae place Franklinia together with Gordonia and Schima in a subtribe.

[8] The tree has a symmetrical, somewhat pyramidal shape, often with different individuals of the species forming almost identical crowns.

[10] Philadelphia botanists John and William Bartram first observed the tree growing along the Altamaha River near Fort Barrington in the British colony of Georgia in October 1765.

William Bartram returned several times to the same location on the Altamaha during a collecting trip to the American South, funded by Dr. John Fothergill of London.

After several years of study, William Bartram assigned the "rare and elegant flowering shrub" to a new genus Franklinia, named in honor of his father's great friend Benjamin Franklin.

The new plant name, Franklinia alatamaha, was first published by a Bartram cousin, Humphry Marshall, in 1785 in his catalogue of North American trees and shrubs entitled Arbustrum Americanum.

[18] The lack of success in returning an extinct-in-the-wild plant to its formerly native range is not unexpected for those aware of Franklinia's status as a glacial relict.

Major rivers draining southward from the Appalachian Mountains are associated with a gradation of paleoendemic tree species.

As with Florida torreya, the relictual status of the now-extinct wild population of Franklinia near the mouth of a major river draining the Appalachian Mountains southward makes investigation of proximal causes of disease secondary to the likelihood of the plant having lost viability as the Holocene warmed.

[21] While seeds may passively float long distances downstream, this mode of dispersal became unavailable for making the reverse trip back to the mountains to track a warming climate.

[23] Northward growing successes contrast with professional failures that have attempted to restore either species to reproductive health in their refugial riverside patches where each apparently survived peak episodes of glacial cold during the Pleistocene epoch.

The Franklin tree has no known pests, but it is subject to root-rot and crown-rot caused by Phytophthora cinnamomi[24] and does not endure drought well.