Welsh Americans
Welsh Americans are an American ethnic group whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Wales, United Kingdom. In the 2008 U.S. Census community survey, an estimated 1.98 million Americans had Welsh ancestry, 0.6% of the total U.S. population. This compares with a population of 3 million in Wales. However, 3.8% of Americans appear to bear a Welsh surname.
There have been several US presidents with Welsh ancestry, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James A. Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama. Other prominent figures of Welsh descent in American history include Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.
The proportion of the American population with a name of Welsh origin ranges from 9.5% in South Carolina to 1.1% in North Dakota. Typically, names of Welsh origin are concentrated in the mid-Atlantic states, New England, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama and in Appalachia, West Virginia and Tennessee.
Welsh immigration to the United States
Legendary origins
Welsh Voyages and settlements in America are said to have taken place in the twelfth century, led by Madoc the son of Owain Gwynedd, and prince of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. References to these voyages are found within Medieval Welsh literature and Welsh folklore, but are generally dismissed by modern authors. The Madog legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era when Welsh and English writers used it bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain, France and Portugal. The earliest surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, as the first to make the claim that Madoc had come to America, appears in Humphrey Llwyd 1559 Cronica Walliae, an English adaptation of the Brut y Tywysogion.An additional aspect of the legend indicates that his settlers ultimately encountered the Mandan, a Native American tribe, who acquired the ability to speak Welsh.
In America, the first governor of Tennessee, John Sevier wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The chief allegedly told him that the forts had been built by a group of White people called "Welsh", as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region.
Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armor bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms, a claim seemingly corroborated by Thomas S. Hinde who stated that six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coat of arms, also in 1799.
While no surviving archaeological or linguistic evidence of the Madoc voyages has survived in the New World, a number of legends connect pre-Columbian Welsh with certain American sites have are still extant. Such as the legends around Devil's Backbone, located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky.
Colonial-era migration
The first modern documented Welsh arrivals came from Wales after 1618. In the mid to late seventeenth century, there was a large emigration of Welsh Quakers to the Colony of Pennsylvania, where a Welsh Tract was established in the region immediately west of Philadelphia. By 1700, Welsh people accounted for about one-third of the colony's estimated population of twenty thousand. There are a number of Welsh place names in this area. The Welsh were especially numerous and politically active and elected 9% of the members of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council.In 1757, Rev. Goronwy Owen, an Anglican Vicar born at Y Dafarn Goch, in the parish of Llanfair Mathafarn Eithaf in Anglesey and whose contribution to Welsh poetry is most responsible for the subsequent Welsh eighteenth century Renaissance, emigrated to Williamsburg, in the Colony of Virginia. Until his death on his cotton and tobacco plantation near Lawrenceville, Virginia in 1769, Rev. Owen was mostly noted as an émigré bard, writing with hiraeth for his native Anglesey. During the subsequent revival of the Eisteddfod, the Gwyneddigion Society held up the poetry of Rev. Owen as an example for bards at future eisteddfodau to emulate.
Post-Revolutionary migration
During the Eisteddfod revival of the 1790s, Gwyneddigion Society member William Jones, who had enthusiastically supported the American Revolution and who was arguing for the creation of a National Eisteddfod of Wales, had come to believe that the completely Anglicized Welsh nobility, through rackrenting and their employment of unscrupulous land agents, had forfeited all right to the obedience and respect of their tenants. At the Llanrwst eisteddfod in June 1791, Jones distributed copies of an address, entitled To all Indigenous Cambro-Britons, in which he urged Welsh tenant farmers and craftsmen to pack their bags, emigrate from Wales, and sail for what he called the "Promised Land" in the United States.In 1900, there were 93,744 Welsh-born resident in the United States, more than half of whom were settled in Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania. In those three states, Welsh immigrants tended to work in coal mining, slate quarrying, and metallurgy.
Pennsylvania
According to Marcus Tanner, large-scale Welsh immigration following the American Revolution began in the 1790s, when 50 immigrants left the village of Llanbrynmair for a tract of Pennsylvania land purchased by Baptist minister Rev. Morgan John Rhys. The result was the farming settlement of Cambria, Pennsylvania.In the 19th century, thousands of Welsh coal miners emigrated to the anthracite and bituminous mines of Pennsylvania, many becoming mine managers and executives. The miners brought organizational skills, exemplified in the United Mine Workers labor union, and its most famous leader John L. Lewis, who was born in a Welsh settlement in Iowa. Pennsylvania has the most Welsh Americans, approximately 200,000; they are primarily concentrated in the Western and Northeastern regions of the state.
Ohio
Welsh settlement in Ohio began in 1801, when a group of Welsh-speaking pioneers migrated from Cambria, Pennsylvania, to Paddy's Run, which is now the site of Shandon, Ohio.According to Marcus Tanner, "In Ohio State, Jackson and Gallia counties in particular became a 'Little Wales', where Welsh settlers were sufficiently thick on the ground by the 1830s to justify the establishment of Calvinistic Methodist synods."
In the early nineteenth century most of the Welsh settlers were farmers, but later there was emigration by coal miners to the coalfields of Ohio and Pennsylvania and by slate quarrymen from North Wales to the "Slate Valley" region of Vermont and Upstate New York. There was a large concentration of Welsh people in the Appalachian section of Southeast Ohio, such as Jackson County, Ohio, which was nicknamed "Little Wales".
As late as 1900, Ohio still had 150 Welsh-speaking church congregations.
The Welsh language was commonly spoken in the Jackson County area for generations until the 1950s when its use began to subside. As of 2010, more than 126,000 Ohioans are of Welsh descent and about 135 speak the language, with significant concentrations still found in many communities of Ohio such as Oak Hill, Madison, Franklin, Jackson, Radnor, and Jefferson.
Southern United States
A particularly large proportion of the African American population has Welsh surnames. A possible factor leading to this is slaves adopting the surnames of their former masters, though evidence for this is sparse.Examples of slave- and plantation-owning Welsh Americans include Welsh poet Rev. Goronwy Owen and American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. While there were cases of slaves adopting their masters' surnames, Welsh religious groups and anti-slavery groups also helped to assist slaves to freedom and evidence exists of names adopted for this reason. In other situations, slaves took on their own new identity of Freeman, Newman, or Liberty, while others chose the surnames of American heroes or founding fathers, which in both cases could have been Welsh in origin.
Tennessee
The premier recent scholarly treatment of Welsh settlers in Tennessee is the work of Cardiganshire-born Harvard Professor . To author , Davies did extensive research in academic collections, site visits, and interviews with descendants and Welsh émigré residents of Tennessee in the early 21st Century. A short interview with Dr. Davies, discussing his research, is .Many Welsh descendants, especially Quakers, migrated to Tennessee—primarily from Colonial settlements in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina—pre-Statehood and in the early years of the 19th Century.
The first organized settlement occurred in the 1850s, inspired by Reverend Samuel Roberts, a Congregational pastor from Llanbrynmair, Montgomeryshire. Engaging with former Ohio governor William Bebb and Welsh immigrant Evan B. Jones, of Cincinnati, Roberts, known as "S.R.", promoted Welsh migration to Scott County, Tennessee. The first emigrants left Wales for Philadelphia in June, 1856. The first settlers arrived at Nancy's Branch in Scott County in September, 1856. Ultimately, the settlement failed. Some of the settlers migrated to Knoxville, while others migrated to other parts of the United States. Only three families, plus Samuel Roberts and John Jones remained at the settlement named Brynyffynon. The National Library of Wales has a collection of original material related to the settlement, identified as the "."
Following the American Civil War, several Welsh immigrant families moved from the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania to Central East Tennessee. These Welsh families settled primarily in an area now known as Mechanicsville in the city of Knoxville. These families were recruited by the brothers Joseph and David Richards to work in a rolling mill then co-owned by John H. Jones.
The Richards brothers co-founded the Knoxville Iron Works beside the L&N Railroad, later to be used as the site for the 1982 World's Fair. Of the original buildings of the Iron Works where Welsh immigrants worked, only the structure housing the restaurant 'The Foundry' remains. At the time of the 1982 World's Fair, the building was known as the Strohaus.
Having first met in donated space at the Second Presbyterian Church, the immigrant Welsh built their own Congregational Church, with the Reverend Thomas Thomas serving as the first pastor in 1870. However, by 1899, the church property was sold. The Welsh celebrated their native culture here, holding services in Welsh and hosting choral competitions and other activities that kept the community connected.
These Welsh-immigrant families became successful and established other businesses in Knoxville. By 1930, many descendants of post-Civil War Knoxville's Welsh families dispersed into other sections of the city and neighboring counties.. Today, scores of families in greater Knoxville can trace their ancestry directly to these original immigrants. The Welsh tradition in Knoxville was remembered with Welsh descendants' celebrating St. David's Day until the early 21st century. The Knoxville Welsh Society is now defunct.
Because of pit mining north of Knoxville, a significant Welsh settlement was established in Anderson and Campbell Counties, especially in the towns of Briceville and Coal Creek. The non-profit has spearheaded efforts to document and preserve the history of Welsh settlers in this region.
Chattanooga and nearby communities such as Soddy-Daisy were home to Welsh immigrants who worked in the mining and iron industries. The and the provide substantial information about the Welsh settlers in southeastern Tennessee.
During 1984–1985, Welsh educator David Greenslade travelled in Tennessee, documenting current and historic Welsh settlements as part of a larger, nationwide study of Welsh in the United States. Greenslade's research resulted in the book, Welsh Fever. Greenslade's papers are archived at the National Library of Wales.
Award-winning actress Dale Dickey is a descendant of Knoxville's Richards brothers. Her ancestor, Reverend R. D. Thomas, another Welsh immigrant to Knoxville, authored the seminal work Hanes Cymru America in 1872. A digital version of the original book, in Welsh, is available on-line.