The first organized group of Welsh immigrants settled in East Tennessee about 1856.
"Religious leaders have always had a very powerful influence in Wales. In the early years of the nineteenth century they had not been in favor of emigration as the means for curing the ills that beset the Welsh, but eventually they came down heavily in favor of this remedy. Men like Benjamin W. Chidlaw and R. D. Thomas did for the Welsh what Ole Running did for the Norwegians and Gottfried Duden for the Germans. They wrote and spoke constantly in favor of emigration to the United States, and produced emigrant guidebooks for the Welsh in their native tongue.
"By mid-century, however, many were becoming increasingly concerned with the fear that in America the Welsh language and Welsh culture would be completely lost unless measures were taken to ensure that Welsh emigration was concentrated into exclusive, compact Welsh settlements. An attempt to form such a settlement was made in 1856 by Samuel Roberts, a Congregationalist minister from Llanbrynmair who was also a tenant farmer, a scholar, and a considerable social force in nineteenth-century Wales. In conjunction with William Bebb of Illinois, Gwilym Williams, William and John Roberts Jones, and his brother Richard, all of Llanbrynmair, S. R. (as he was known in Wales) purchased a hundred thousand acres of land in eastern Tennessee which they were prepared to sell to buyers at 2s. 6d. an acre, but at somewhat higher prices for choice lots. The prospectus of the Welsh settlement in Tennessee was an eminently sound and workmanlike document. Unfortunately, the purchasers had not reckoned with the Southern system of land sales. Richard Roberts took out the first group of settlers in 1856 and was followed by S. R. in 1857 with a second group.
"Almost immediately they found that their title to much of the land was disputed, and a series of lawsuits rendered the settlement virtually stillborn. The Welsh began to break up, and the difficulties of Samuel Roberts were swallowed up in the greater trials of the Civil War in America; but it was long before many surrendered their belief that he was in favor of slavery, even after he returned to Wales in 1866. William Bebb, although transferring the blame for failure to the settlers themselves, maintained that it was impossible to conserve a Welsh island in an ocean of other peoples and least of all in Tennessee on the brink of the Civil War.
"The majority of the Welsh were, like most European immigrants, neither frontiersmen nor trail blazers. . ." It would seem that the first Welsh immigrants into the Clinch River Valley had nearly as hard a time as the first settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1600's" (pp. 10-11).
