Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720 - 1940

County surveyor for Co. Tyrone, 1842-1847.   Frederick J. Rowan can probably be identified as Frederick James Rowan (1817c-1884), fifth son of Robert Rowan of Co. Antrim and his first wife, Martha Stewart (née Rainey), who married Mary Wicketts Best on 2 August 1842, was the father of Frederic Charles Rowan (1844-1892), a civil engineer in Australia ,(1) and died in 1884.   Frederick J. Rowan worked for the Midland Great Western Railway Company before being appointed county surveyor for Co. Tyrone on 3 January 1842, in succession to RICHARD RICHARDS [2]  RICHARD RICHARDS [2] . His years in the post coincided with the worst period of the potato famine and saw the construction of the Omagh workhouse and  the government relif programme of 1846-1847.   He resigned in September 1847, after which the county was split into two divisions.

Following his resignation Rowan is said to have left Ireland.   He is probably the Frederick Rowan who worked on the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada in the 1850s and was engineer-in-chief to the Danish Railway Operating Company in the 1860s.(2)



References

All information in this entry not otherwise referenced is from Brendan O'Donoghue, The Irish County Surveyors 1834-1944 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 292-293, which gives the fullest account of Rowan's career,  B. Burke, Landed Gentry of Ireland (1904), 525, and www.familysearch.org (2008).


(1)
See Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110750b.htm (2008).
(2) See note 1, above.