Welsh Americans

Welsh Settlement in North America

According to medieval legend, Prince Madog ap Owain Gwynedd crossed the Atlantic in 1170 with three ships and founded a colony in what is today Alabama. A memorial to Madog was erected on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama, in 1953. The legend of Prince Madog gave rise to the legends of Welsh-speaking Indians in North America (especially the Mandan tribe). The legend also was cited as England's claim to sovereignty over the United States. Some people believe that America was named after a Welsh merchant, Richard Amerik (ap Meurig), who was a financial backer of John Cabot, rather than the chronologically later mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci.

In 1607, a Welsh and Cornish colony was established in what later became Maryland, and in 1617, one was founded in Newfoundland. Many Welsh Quakers came to Pennsylvania to escape religious oppression after William Penn promised them a colony to be called New Wales. Although this was rejected by the Crown, many towns and cities in Pennsylvania bear Welsh names, such as Bryn Mawr, to this day.

The oldest Baptist church in the United States was founded by Welsh settlers in Swansea, Massachusetts, in the mid-17th century. According to historians Julie Brake and Christine Jones, the oldest ethnic language society in the United States was founded by Welsh in Philadelphia in 1729. Fourteen of the Revolutionary War generals were Welsh, and 18 of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence were descended from Welsh immigrants, including Thomas Jefferson. As of 2004, 11 U.S. presidents were of Welsh descent. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey reports that 1,793,356 people report Welsh ancestry (with a margin of error of 25,237).

Culture

In the 19th century, another wave of Welsh immigration to the United States followed the coal mining, iron smelting, and tin plating booms in Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Many of these immigrants settled in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but some spread out along the Ohio River, where their descendants remain to this day. As late as the 1950s, there were Episcopal (Anglican) churches in southern Ohio in which Sunday services were conducted in Welsh. Other Welsh Americans were descended from Nonconformist worshippers, as were the Quakers. The later Welsh immigrants to America included many Methodists after their 1811 break with the Church of England. Some of them settled in Kansas and Wisconsin. The gold and silver rushes of the mid- and later 19th century spread Welsh miners throughout the west.

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