Welsh Journals

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Richards, a man of small property who had led over the Baptists from Salem, at St. Clears in Carmarthenshire. Twelve families and four bachelors, they ringed trees, planted their axe-crop and huddled before the winter. 'My first habitation here', wrote Rees Lloyd years later to his brother, 'was a little cabin covered with spruce limbs or rather spruce brush and Providence covered that with snow two feet deep, where now the town of Ebensburg is. In this place my child Rachel was born'.4 In that place he lost her to the wilderness which was to break the spirit of half of them. But though they had to go 26 miles for seed-corn and iron, their spirits were high, for, in the spring, the second party came- John J. Evans and William Rees, John Roberts (Penbryn) and William Williams (South)-twelve more families and six bachelors, with Simon James, the Baptist elder from Blaenywaun near St. Dogmael's in Cardiganshire, who had ministered to them back in the Great Valley and among the old Welsh churches of eastern Pennsylvania. With them, also, came their leader, who held (under mortgage) the ground they laboured at. Morgan John Rhys, or Rhees as he called himself now, came to lay out a town and to give names to the land.6 He brought with him The Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen, prince of the Cambro-Britons, which was to be the first book in the town library, but he had also been reading his Isaiah 'Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine but they that have gathered it shall eat it and praise the Lord. Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate, but thou shalt be called Hephzibah (that is, my delight is in thee) and thy land Beulah 4 Rees Lloyd Jonah Lloyd, 4 September 1837; copies in Cambria County Historical Society and (printed) in C. T. Roberts' centennial history of the First Congregational Church. Ebensburg (1898). 5 Particularly important for these first two groups are original deeds and letters in Cambria County Historical Society; correspondence and articles in the local press, particularly the Cambria Freeman and Mountaineer-Herald; census, taxation and testamentary materials in the courthouses; an account by Rees Lloyd in the centennial history cited above; another by George Roberts quoted in Biographical Cyclopedia of Cambria County (Philadelphia. 1896); membership lists, with comments, in the anonymous Home Coming Celebration of First Congregational Church, Ebensburg (1934), and two letters from William Richards to Samuel Jones. 16 and 22 March 1796. in Pennepek papers. Morgan John Rhys became an American citizen on 7 March 1797 (Prothonotary's Records, Philadelphia County, in City Hall, Philadelphia); in the U.S.A., he spelt his name Rhees. Since, in this form. it became the family name, I have retained his orthography (as also in Beula for Beulah). 7 This heads the list of Rhees's own contributions to the Library, recorded in his Library notebook, which passed to George Roberts and is now in the Cambria County Historical Society.