Carrington St named after city’s ‘father’
Carrington St runs from central New Plymouth to just south of the intersection with Saxton Rd, where it becomes Carrington Rd.
Both thoroughfares were named after the man once known as the father of New Plymouth.
Frederic Alonzo Carrington (1807-1901) selected the location of the town under the auspices of the Plymouth Company.
He arrived in Taranaki on the ship Brougham in February 1841 and began surveying the area.
In November of that year he drew up his plans showing the city of New Plymouth laid out in a tidy grid with 2267 quarter-acre sections and the so-called green or town belt separating future suburban districts.
The first Plymouth Company emigrants from Devon and Cornwall may have been expecting a more organised settlement, finding only “a few vague lines cut through the fern between the two rivers [Te Hēnui and Huatoki]”.
They had to camp on the beach in the meantime, but Carrington’s vision eventually became a reality.
Carrington returned to England in 1843, disillusioned with his treatment by the Plymouth Company, but in 1857 he and his wife and children returned for good.
Decadesofpublicservicefollowed,including appointments as a government engineering surveyor and the superintendent of Taranaki province as well as time spent as an MP.
He was also instrumental in securing funds for the creation of the New Plymouth harbour, laying the first stone for the breakwater at the port in 1881.
Carrington died on July 15, 1901, and is buried in Te Hēnui Cemetery.
A marble tablet erected by his daughters in St Mary’s Church, now Taranaki Cathedral, celebrates him as “The Father of New Plymouth”, and a bronze statue honouring his contribution to the city was unveiled in Robe St Park in 2012.
Interestingly, the name of Carrington St was swapped with that of Victoria Rd during World War I. Early maps had Carrington Rd (as it was originally called) running south alongside what later became Pukekura Park.
But in 1917 the borough council passed a resolution declaring that “Carrington Rd from its intersection with Gilbert St to Holdsworthy [sic] Rd [is] hereby altered to and named Victoria Rd”.
Carrington Rd, which at the time reached “the Southern Boundary of New Plymouth Borough”, was not divided into Carrington St and Rd in directories until the 1950s. Contributed by the Taranaki Research Centre I Te Pua Wānanga o Taranaki at Puke Ariki. Find this and hundreds of other street histories on the New Plymouth District Council’s Puke Ariki website.