Frederic Carrington
New Zealand politician and surveyor (1807–1901)
Frederic Alonzo Carrington (11 October 1807 – 15 July 1901) was a 19th-century New Zealand politician and surveyor. He is regarded as the Father of New Plymouth.
Carrington was born in Chelmsford, Essex, England, in 1807, the son of Captain William Carrington.
He was 15 years in the Ordnance Survey Department. Then he was appointed by the New Zealand Company as Chief Surveyor to the Plymouth Company and surveyed the new settlement of New Plymouth. He arrived in Wellington with his family in the ship London in December 1840 as a cabin passenger.
In 1844, he returned to England, and undertook surveying for parliamentary committees in England and Scotland. In 1851, he displayed iron made from Taranaki iron sand at The Great Exhibition, London. From 1851 to 1856 he investigated business proposals in California and other parts of America, Paris and Belgium.
He left for New Zealand with his family in January 1857 and in 1862 was made Government Engineering Surveyor for Taranaki.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Frederic Carrington” as new Zealand politician and surveyor (1807–1901). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as new Zealand politician and surveyor (1807–1901). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5496973. VIAF identifies the subject as 78534659. The Library of Congress control number is no2006067177. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1807, 1901, 1840 and 1844.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederic Carrington” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.