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First coal wave (1820s–1870s)

The Welsh of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania — Skilled Miners & Mine Bosses

The skilled miners and mine bosses of the first coal wave — a small, disproportionately powerful, chapel-and-song people. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview

When anthracite turned Schuylkill County into an industrial district in the 1820s and 1830s, the men who already knew how to win coal from deep rock came from the coalfields of Wales. They were never numerous — a 100-male sample of St. Clair-area miners in Wallace’s study counted 62 English to just 10 Welsh — but they were strategically placed: arriving with hard-won underground skill, the Welsh moved straight into the best-paid, most-skilled work and rapidly up into the supervisory tier as contract miners, foremen, and colliery superintendents. They were the bosses for whom the Irish dug. Around that occupational position they built a self-contained world of Nonconformist chapels, the Welsh language, and competitive song — and, at its sharp edge, an antagonism with Irish labor that fed directly into the Molly Maguire conflict. ★

A scale-setting honesty up front: Schuylkill’s Welsh were the southern-field cousins of a much larger Welsh community in the northern anthracite field (Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Carbondale) and the Lehigh iron district. The grandest eisteddfodau, the famous choirs and composers, and the iconic figure of Welsh anthracite know-how (David Thomas, who built America’s first successful anthracite-iron furnace at Catasauqua, Lehigh County, in 1840) belong to those other fields. Schuylkill’s Welsh story is real but is a smaller, “skilled-middle-stratum” version — a story of foremen and chapels rather than celebrities. ⚑

Sources: Anthony F. C. Wallace, St. Clair — “Immigrants in the coal region” (APS); Wallace — “Life in town”; Historic Catasauqua — David Thomas.

Why the Welsh were the skilled miners

The mechanism is documented precisely by Wallace: “Most of the Welsh and English emigrants to Saint Clair came from the richest coal districts of the British Isles, and many had already obtained valuable skills working in and around the mines. Drawing upon these experiences, Welshmen and Englishmen were able to move into the most highly-paid, highly-skilled work in the mines and to maneuver rapidly into supervisory positions.” ★ They did not learn the trade in America; they arrived expert, having worked the pits of the South Wales valleys (Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, the Swansea Valley) and North Wales.

That expertise plugged directly into the county’s contract-mining system: a skilled “contract miner” was hired to sink shafts or slopes and drive the gangways and airways, paid by the job, and in turn hired his own laborers — typically Irish or German — beneath him. This is the structural basis of the figure that recurs through the county’s labor history: the Welsh boss who hired (and could fire) his own men. As historian Ronald Lewis frames the whole phenomenon, the Welsh “coal-mining culture” was effectively a single transatlantic system, and a majority of the 100,000-plus Welsh-born in the 1890 United States were “skilled laborers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies.” ★

Sources: Wallace — Immigrants; HSP — Wallace background reading (PDF); Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans (UNC Press).

Settlement: Minersville, St. Clair, the Mahanoy Valley

The earliest documented Welsh arrival is the often-repeated “few Welsh immigrated to Minersville in 1832” — and the primary source adds vivid detail. A Welsh Congregational church history records that in 1832 a few Welsh families in Minersville began holding meetings “in the carpenter shop of a man named McPherson,” where “as usual, the Baptists, Calvinistic Methodists, and Independents were together,” and soon invited Rev. E. B. Evans of Pottsville to take charge. ✔ Minersville had just incorporated as a borough in 1831, and its own official history confirms the sequence: “English and Welsh immigrants, followed by those from Germany and Ireland, who brought mining experience from their home lands, became some of the first settlers.” ⚑ (No individual 1832 Welsh settler is named in the record — only the venue, McPherson’s shop, and the first minister sought.)

St. Clair is the best-documented Welsh settlement: by 1850 more than half the town was foreign-born, and the Welsh and English “were nearly as concentrated in town as the Germans and there recreated a network of community organizations similar to those they had left behind in Britain.” ★ Mahanoy City drew Welsh as well — its town history says many early settlers “were Welsh people attracted to the place by the flattering opportunities for mining with which business they were familiar in their native country.” ★

The clearest “Welsh patch” is Park Place in the Mahanoy Valley — literally “the Welsh Colliery,” opened in 1872 and “owned and operated by Welshmen, David Reynolds, Joseph Roberts, and Richard Phillips”; the nearby Whip-Poor-Will Colliery was likewise run by a party of Welshmen (Reynolds, Phillips, Walter Lewis, John Griffith). ★

Sources: Providence Welsh Congregational history (1832 Minersville); Minersville Borough — history; Wallace — Life in town; Mahanoy Area Historical Society — history; T. L. Thomas — Collieries in and around Mahanoy City.

The chapel: Welsh Nonconformity in the coalfield

The Welsh transplanted their Nonconformist “big three” — Congregationalists (Annibynwyr / Independents), Baptists (Bedyddwyr), and Calvinistic Methodists (the Presbyterian Church of Wales) — and in small towns these often began as a single joint meeting before splitting into separate chapels once each denomination was strong enough. Minersville is the textbook case (the joint 1832 meetings in McPherson’s shop gradually separated; the Calvinistic Methodists built their own small church about 1864–65). Dated county chapels include:

  • St. Clair Welsh Baptist — Welsh-language Baptist worship from 1845 under Rev. William Morgan; the formally organized church (1862) on South Front Street was dedicated December 31, 1871. ★
  • St. Clair Welsh Calvinistic Methodist — 1846. ★ ✎ (Note: Wallace lists a Welsh Congregationalist presence in St. Clair, but the authoritative St. Clair church inventories record only a Welsh Baptist congregation — no separate Welsh Congregational church. A distinct St. Clair Welsh Congregational chapel is therefore probably a conflation, its existence as a separate body unconfirmed.)
  • Mahanoy City Welsh Congregational — organized December 20, 1863; building 1865 (its basement even housed the public school in 1867). Zion Welsh Baptist followed in 1865. ★

The chapel was the principal institution sustaining the Welsh language in America — services, Sunday school, and hymn-singing were all conducted in Cymraeg, making the chapel the bulwark of the tongue long after daily and commercial life had shifted to English.

Sources: Wallace — Immigrants; St. Clair churches (RootsWeb); Mahanoy Area Historical Society — history; Providence Welsh Congregational history.

Song and word: the Eisteddfod, the Gymanfa Ganu, and a Pottsville Welsh press

Welsh cultural life in the county ran on two great institutions of voice. The Gymanfa Ganu (congregational hymn-singing festival) reached the county early: the Welsh Congregational record states that after the first American Welsh Gymanfaoedd at Pittsburgh (1838) and Ebensburg (1839), “the next year the Gymanfa was held at Pottsville, Minersville, etc.” — i.e., Pottsville and Minersville hosted Gymanfaoedd in 1840. ✔ The festivals were timed to the Welsh calendar, between St. David’s Day (March 1) and St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), and choirs could run to two hundred voices.

The Eisteddfod — the competitive festival of poetry and choral music, crowning bards and awarding prizes — was held in the county as well. As the documentary record establishes, Schuylkill County newspapers gave front-page coverage to eisteddfodau in Shenandoah (1891), Mahanoy City (1892), and Pottsville (1895–96, 1907, 1914–15, and as late as 1947) — confirming it as a genuine local institution, not merely a northern-field import (the tradition’s American debut was at Carbondale in 1850). ✔ A bardic crown was awarded at an eisteddfod in Minersville. ⚑ (Honest scale note: the grandest regional eisteddfodau — culminating in the Scranton Choral Union’s victory at the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair — belonged to the northern field.)

A genuinely new find for the county’s cultural record: a Welsh-language periodical was printed in Pottsville. Y Seren Orllewinol (“The Western Star”), a Welsh Baptist paper (1844–1866), was printed in Pottsville — by B. Bannan until March 1853, then by Richard Edwards (its editor from 1848). ✔ (The printer was Benjamin Bannan of the Miners’ Journal — not himself Welsh, but the commercial printer of a Welsh-language paper.) This makes Pottsville a documented node of Welsh-language print culture in the mid-19th century, alongside the national Welsh-American weekly Y Drych. A formal Cambrian Society also operated in Pottsville, organized by Dr. David E. Jones as founding president.

Sources: Providence Welsh Congregational history (Gymanfa, 1840); PA Heritage — “A Welsh Community that United in Song”; GENUKI — Welsh-American periodicals (Y Seren Orllewinol); Lackawanna Historical Society — David E. Jones collection (Pottsville Cambrian Society).

Welsh bosses, Irish labor, and the “Modocs”

The Welsh occupied a genuinely double position in the county’s labor wars. On one hand, the Welsh and English “brought with them a tradition of organized labor learned in the coal regions at home,” and that tradition fed the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA, 1868), the first effective miners’ union. On the other hand, the Welsh were the resented foremen and contract bosses — and the grievances behind the Molly Maguire violence were aimed in part at “the Welsh miners for whom the Irish worked, mine officials, [and] the bob-tailed check.” ★

That antagonism had an organized, violent edge. The Modocs were a Welsh-German gang “affiliated with the local Republican Party, who served as their enforcers during elections”; mine owners “liked to hire Welsh miners, particularly Modocs, to moonlight as Coal and Iron Police… to harass and bully Irish labor organizers.” ★ They clashed repeatedly with the Irish Ancient Order of Hibernians (tied to the local Democrats) — and the Pinkerton detective McParlan, building the Molly prosecution, “conveniently forgot the Modocs and the ‘Chain Gang’.”

✎ But the line was not simply Welsh-versus-Irish. Wallace shows that skilled, pre-famine “Kilkenny men” — experienced Irish miners from the less-devastated southeast of Ireland — assimilated like the Welsh, and “during the ethnic conflicts of the Molly Maguire era, Kilkenny men joined with Welshmen in the ‘Chain Gang’” against the western-county Irish. The real fault line ran along skill and origin, with the Welsh at its center. (See the Irish & Molly Maguires profile.)

Sources: Wallace — Immigrants; Wikipedia — Molly Maguires (Modocs, Chain Gang).

People

Schuylkill’s notable Welsh are not celebrities but the skilled colliery stratum — superintendents, foremen, operators — recorded across the Mahanoy Valley collieries: ★

  • Daniel Thomas of Morea — colliery superintendent and a State Senator from the district in the 1890s, the most prominent Welsh political-industrial figure in the county record.
  • David Reynolds, Joseph Roberts, Richard Phillips — operators of Park Place (“the Welsh Colliery,” 1872).
  • Thomas Lewis Sr. (general superintendent, Cole’s Colliery) and Thomas Williams (inside foreman, shot in the labor troubles of 1875); John Phillips and Capt. Edward Phillips (Suffolk); Morgan Price and Morgan Beddow (New Boston); Rees Tasker (Boston Run).
  • Welsh clergy: Rev. E. B. Evans (Pottsville Welsh Congregational, to 1850), Rev. William Morgan (Welsh Baptist, Pottsville & St. Clair), Rev. R. R. Williams (Minersville Welsh Congregational, eighteen years).

✎ Two figures commonly confused: John Siney, the great WBA founder of St. Clair, was Irish-born and English-raised, not Welsh (he belongs to the Irish/labor story); and Benjamin Bannan, the Miners’ Journal publisher, was Manx/English — relevant here only as the Pottsville printer of Y Seren Orllewinol.

Sources: T. L. Thomas — Collieries in and around Mahanoy City; Wallace — Immigrants (Siney).

Assimilation and legacy

The Welsh assimilated quickly and with little friction — Protestant, English-literate (bilingual), and skilled, they met “no apparent hostility from Americans,” and Welsh cultural institutions often faded within a single generation into a new “Welsh American” identity. The Welsh language declined under English-medium schooling, economic mobility, intermarriage, and the cutoff of fresh immigration after 1914; Y Drych shifted from Welsh to English, and Gymanfa participation tapered after the 1910s. ★

The legacy in Schuylkill is real but largely residual: the saturating Welsh patronymic surnames that fill the colliery record (Jones, Williams, Evans, Davies, Morgan, Lewis, Phillips, Roberts, Griffith, Price, Rees, Thomas); commercial place-names like Park Place (“the Welsh Colliery”); and the memory of the chapels and eisteddfodau. Pennsylvania still has the most Welsh Americans of any state (~200,000), though the living, organized Welsh-American institutions today center on the northern field and Pittsburgh rather than Schuylkill — a final measure of the southern field’s smaller, quieter Welsh story.

Sources: Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans (UNC Press); PA Heritage — United in Song; Wikipedia — Welsh Americans.

Open questions

  • Newspaper confirmation (newspapers.com / Pottsville Free Public Library) of the specific eisteddfod programs — winners, choirs, adjudicators — behind the 1891–1947 coverage.
  • Whether a St. Clair Welsh Congregational chapel ever existed as a separate body (the record suggests not — likely a conflation with the Welsh Baptist), and a fuller roster of county Welsh chapels.
  • A named 1832 Minersville Welsh settler (beyond McPherson’s shop and Rev. E. B. Evans).
  • The full extent of the Modoc/Chain Gang networks, cross-referenced with the Molly Maguire record.

Sources

Frequently asked

Why were the Welsh the skilled miners of Schuylkill County?
Most Welsh emigrants to the coal region came from the richest coal districts of Wales and arrived already expert, having worked the pits of the South Wales valleys and North Wales. They moved straight into the most highly-paid, highly-skilled work and rapidly up into supervisory positions as contract miners, foremen, and colliery superintendents.
Were there many Welsh in Schuylkill County?
No — they were few but strategically placed. A 100-male sample of St. Clair-area miners in Wallace's study counted 62 English to just 10 Welsh. Schuylkill's Welsh were the southern-field cousins of a much larger Welsh community in the northern anthracite field (Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Carbondale) and the Lehigh iron district.
Was a Welsh-language newspaper printed in Schuylkill County?
Yes. Y Seren Orllewinol ('The Western Star'), a Welsh Baptist paper (1844–1866), was printed in Pottsville — by B. Bannan until March 1853, then by Richard Edwards — making Pottsville a documented node of Welsh-language print culture in the mid-19th century.

Towns: Minersville, Saint Clair, Mahanoy City, Pottsville, Shenandoah

Related peoples: English, Irish

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