Howell Powell, who left Brecon for Virginia in 1642, was one of the first Welsh settlers in America. Most emigration from Wales until the late 17th century had been on an individual basis, but after 1660 when Charles II was restored to the English throne, he instigated a wave of religious intolerance which threatened the rights of several groups to worship in the way that they chose, and significant numbers of people - in some cases, whole communities - began to leave Wales. The Court of Great Sessions in Bala, north Wales threatened to burn Quakers, prompting the Welsh Quakers to acquire land (approximately 40,000 acres) in and around what is now Pennsylvania. They emigrated there in 1682.
In 1683 Baptists from mid and west Wales made the journey to Philadelphia, where they settled and acquired 30,000 acres of land on the banks of the Delaware River. Llanbrynmair, in Montgomery, provided another wave of emigrants in 1795, and the first real Welsh colony, Cambria in western Pennsylvania, in which the Welsh language, culture and religion was maintained in a community with a distinct Welsh identity was established there by Morgan John Rhys, a Baptist minister from Glamorgan at around the same time. In the 1850s more settlers left Llanbrynmair led by the Rev. Samuel Roberts (SR) who acquired land for a Welsh colony in Tennessee.
But south Wales provided most of the emigrants to America in the 19th century. The growth of the iron industry in the valleys from the mid 18th century and the later development of the south Wales coalfield, meant that south Wales had a reserve of skilled metalworkers, foundrymen and miners who could find work easily in the rapidly expanding industrial areas of America, like Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Even though migration from Wales to America in the period from the 17th to the 19th century sometimes involved the movement of whole communities, when compared to migration from other countries, the numbers do not seem so significant. Wales had a population of no more than 0.5 million before the 18th century and a little over 1.5 million by 1881. In proportion to population, Irish emigrants to America in the 19th century outnumbered the Welsh by twenty six to one.
The influence that many of the Welsh immigrants had on the emergence of modern America belies their relatively small numbers - sixteen of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were of Welsh descent. Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, (whose family came from a village beneath Snowdon), James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, and more recently Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon had their family roots in Wales. Elihu Yale, the son of Welsh immigrant parents who settled in Boston, founded Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he died his body was brought home to rest in the churchyard of Wrexham Parish Church near the family home of Plas-yn-Ial, Denbigh. A joint-founder of Brown University, Rhode Island, Morgan Edwards, came from Pontypool in Gwent - he spent a year-and-a-half in Britain and Ireland between 1766 and 1768 fundraising for the university. The first graduation ceremony was held there in 1769. By way of contrast, Lampeter University, the first Higher Education institution in Wales, was not even founded until 1822.
The Industrial Revolution may have provided Welsh workers with skills and talents which made them valued as immigrants to north America, but it also had a disastrous impact on the Welsh language and cultural life of the Welsh communities there. Once in America, immigrants were under immense pressure to learn the English language and adopt the ways of the emerging American industrial culture. When they had mastered the language, they would rapidly disperse into the country on the look out for new opportunities. As the Welsh were a relatively small immigrant group, they tended not to meet other Welsh people once they had dispersed, and so the language and the culture died out. (Of course, Welsh language and culture was under pressure at home as well, especially in the south, with the influx of immigrant workers from all over Britain and Ireland). By the second generation, immigrants were often fully assimilated into the American way of life.
Michael D Jones, a Welsh non-conformist minister and ardent nationalist recognised this pattern amongst immigrants to the United States and decided to do something about it. Initially, he organised societies to help the Welsh retain their identity, but rapidly realised that the forces for assimilation were too strong and proposed that only a unified Welsh colony could preserve the Welsh language and culture. The first choice for the new colony was Vancouver Island, in Canada, but gradually an alternative destination began to be considered which seemed to have everything the colonists might need - Patagonia, Argentina.
The first group of settlers, about 150 people gathered from all over Wales, sailed from Liverpool to Patagonia aboard the tea-clipper, Mimosa, landing in New Bay (Port Madryn) on 28th July 1865. Unfortunately, they found that Patagonia was not the friendly and inviting land they had been led to believe it was (they had been told that it was much like lowland Wales). There was no water, very little food and no available shelter. Allegedly, the settlers' first homes were shelters cut out of the soft rock of the cliffs in the bay. They struggled to reach the proposed site for the colony in the River Chubut valley about 40 miles away, and eventually the first permanent settlement was established at Rawson at the end of 1865.
But their trials were not over: floods, bad harvests, arguments over the ownership of land and the lack of a direct route to the ocean where they could export their goods and import necessities made life very difficult. Many decided to move to other areas to try their luck and as a result the population at Rawson decreased. One of the settlers went back to Wales and the United States and recruited new settlers for the colony. As a result, the Electric Spark, a small vessel carried 33 new settlers from Pennsylvania in 1874 who joined a group of 49 settlers that had come from Wales. By the end of 1874 the settlement had a population of 273.
In 1875 the Argentine government finally granted the Welsh settlers official title to the land, and this encouraged people to join the colony. Over 500 people from Wales, mostly from the south Wales coalfield, which was undergoing a severe depression at the time, made the journey to Chubut during 1875-1876. A further 27 settlers arrived from New York. By 1876 the population numbered 690 - of these 135 were second generation Welsh and 35 were non-Welsh settlers. The influx of willing hands meant that plans for a major irrigation system in the Lower Chubut valley could finally go ahead. The new irrigation system revolutionised agriculture in the area and contributed greatly to its rapid expansion and later success.
There were other substantial migrations during the periods 1880-1887 in response to an economic boom in Argentina and the instigation of new government policies to encourage immigration. In the period 1904-1912 a considerable number joined the Welsh colony in response to continued economic depression and industrial insecurity the south Wales coalfield. However, other nationalities were also beginning to settle in Chubut in greater numbers and the colony's Welsh identity began to be eroded.
By 1915, fifty years after the original settlers landed at Port Madryn, the population of Chubut had grown to 23,000 with about half of these being foreign immigrants. The Lower Chubut valley - so inhospitable and barren when they landed 50 years previously - had been transformed by the Welsh settlers into one of the most fertile, productive agricultural areas in Argentina, and they had expanded the territory into the Andean foothills into the settlement known as Cwm Hyfryd. Of the 12,000 people living in the Lower Chubut Valley only about 4,000 were Welsh: the success of the Welsh colony and government initiatives to encourage economic growth in the area had attracted European immigrants from Spain and Italy as well as a massive influx of Argentinean nationals and small numbers of Chileans.
During the next fifty years of the Welsh settlement, many of the institutions which had been established in the early days of the colony, like the Co-operative Society, were split into factions by arguments. The unity of the community - so important to Michael D Jones, whose dream it worked so hard to realise - began to crumble. But, despite these problems the community still survives, and is currently the subject of a co-ordinated attempt by the Argentine government and the National Assembly of Wales to promote and maintain its distinctly Welsh heritage and identity. |
