Keeping in mind that the men who undertook to organize this emigration had never seen the land, modern historians can at least applaud them for their creative and imaginative advertising abilities.  To the average Welsh citizen of the times, this offer must have sounded like an opportunity sent from Heaven!  They were not aware, however, that the land was hardly accessible due to the underdeveloped mountainous area; further, improvement on the land was next to impossible because of a lack of flat grazing land and building sites.  The pastures were more suited for goats than for cattle.  And, the Tennessee Valley Authority had not yet built Norris Dam to prevent flooding!

Although the predominant Welsh settlements in East Tennessee the 19th Century surrounded Coal Creek (now Lake City), the first Welsh settlement was in neighboring Scott and Morgan Counties.  Samuel Roberts described the area of the future settlement in a letter to his cousin, D. Howells, of Machynlleth on 08 July 1856:¹

"I have just received a letter from Mr. Bebb, the third since he has left, written on the 20th June from Cincinnati.  He had just gone carefully over our Tennessee lands.  Our tract in Morgan County, near Montgomery, has fine open timber, good pasture, coal, and iron but is uneven.  We have a tract in Scott's County near Huntsville, its county seat, on the margin of the South fork of the Cumberland River which he has selected for the commencement of our Cambrian Settlement.  He speaks very highly of it. It is dry, healthy, needs no draining, open forests of good, useful, manageable timber, rich pasture, good springs and streams, fine fruit trees.  A better place for sheep and cattle could not be imagined.  Mr. B's description is long and strong.  I am persuaded that it is a beautiful locality and that it is valuable.  He bought timber to build cottages for our people and left Mr. E. B. Jones there to superintend the building.  He then moved off to New York to meet the party [the first group of emigrants under Richard Roberts left in June 1856] and to buy more land in that locality if he can have some on favorable terms" (pp. 115).

Clearly, the organizers were still very optimistic about their project.  However, other documents indicate that the settlers believed they had been defrauded.  Some of these people moved down the valley and became the founders of the Coal Creek settlement or joined with the Richards family in the Knoxville Welsh community.