Carrington Road

Carrington Road is a continuation of Carrington Street. Winding between the Pouākai and Kaitake Ranges, it continues out of New Plymouth to the intersection with Saunders Road near the Hangatahua or Stony River. The division into Carrington Street and Road was only made official in travel directories in the early 1950s but both were named after Frederic Alonzo Carrington (1807-1901).

Carrington was appointed Chief Surveyor of the Plymouth Company in June 1840, tasked with selecting land for the settlement of New Plymouth. He reached Taranaki in 1841, only to find Ngāmotu was “one great forest round the base of the mountain between which & the coast is very many miles of Fern & Bush”.

The Company had acquired some 60,000 acres from local Māori and Carrington could take his pick. Cutting survey lines was exhausting in such dense bush, especially considering he and his family had only the most basic accommodation, sleeping on mats on the ground in a leaky “whare”. He complained of having “neither office table or one single Surveying Staff yet for all this I have the Survey here more advanced than any Colony that can be named considering time & labour”.

Carrington climbed Paritūtū to assess the thousands of acres of potentially rich agricultural land stretching away from the foot of Taranaki Maunga. He visited Waitara and several other spots along the coast, all of which were deemed potential sites for the town, but eventually decided that “About this river [Huatoki] must be the place…”, not least because he was convinced a fine harbour could one day be constructed at the Sugar Loaves.

Formation of Carrington Road past the boundaries of the original Borough of New Plymouth was undertaken by teams of labourers using only picks and shovels. Some planted rhododendrons near what is now Pukeiti Gardens, a property gifted to the Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust by Douglas Cook in 1951.

Residents of “Upper Carrington” took out a £1000 loan in 1904 to metal their clay road, the poor condition of which meant that mail often had to be offloaded from carriages and delivered by individual pack horses or “sledged” to recipients. Better road access enabled the mining of ochre at Pukeiti and easier logging of large rimu and other native trees once so admired by Frederic Carrington.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.