Welsh Journals

No deeds to persons bearing Welsh names have been found in Steuben township before 1803.6 Lacking funds for purchasing land, many if not all of the earliest Welsh settlers took up leases under Walker. During the 1790s thousands of upstate pioneers who lacked funds (and most belonged to this category) became tenants of Stephen Van Rensselaer in Albany and Rensselaer counties, James Wadsworth in the Genesee Valley, James Duane near Schenectady, and dozens of large landholders in the Hudson Valley and in Delaware County.7 To substantiate these inferences, we also have the statement of Llewellyn Howell that it was Benjamin Walker who induced the Welsh to settle in Steuben. The first group of Welsh settlers, five heads of families, reached Steuben on 15 September 1795, where they found five or six families of Americans.9 They had travelled from New York City by sloop up the Hudson River, by bateau up the Mohawk River to Utica, and then by wagon for four days to Steuben. They set to work felling trees and building log cabins. Apparently these pioneers liked their new homes and they wrote to their friends in New York City and Pennsylvania to join them. By 1812 one observer estimated that there were 700 Welsh people in the neighbourhood of Steuben.10 The Welsh did not settle the Remsen township until after 1800. The main landholder was the Holland Land Company, an association of Amsterdam banking houses, which owned about 5,000,000 acres in New York and Pennsylvania. In 1792 Gerrit Boon, their agent, bought the Servis Patent which contained some 30,000 acres stretching northward from Utica to beyond the present village of Remsen. In 1795 Boon arranged for surveys of the tract, which was divided into 120-acre lots. New Englanders bought over thirty lots in that year and over 6,000 acres. The settlers received only five to six year's credit but Boon found it necessary to make many extensions and to accept payment in kind. Evans found that Welsh names Evans, 'Welsh in Oneida County', p. 44. An inventory of Walker's estate in 1826 shows that half of the twenty-four rent payers in Steuben bore Welsh names. Another list of mortgages includes some Welsh purchasers buying the farms in 1806. B. Walker Papers, Oneida Historical Society, Utica. 7 For a survey showing the extent of leasehold tenancy in the period 1790-1810, see Ellis, Landlords and Farmers, pp. 26-65. 8 Llewellyn Howell, Traithawd ar Ddechreuad a Chynydd y Cymry yn Utica a'i Hamgylchoedd (Rome, N.Y., 1860). A translation is available in Utica Morning Herald, 29 April 1879, and most of it is quoted in Dr. Moses M. Bagg, Pioneers of Utica (Utica, 1877). Griffith O. Griffiths, son of one of the original five pioneers, has written an account of the early settlement of Steuben. It is quoted in Daniel E. Wager (ed.), Our County and Its People, A Descriptive Work on Oneida County (Boston, 1896), pp. 547-49. 10 lago ap Owain in Y Cyfaill, 1839, translated and reprinted in The Cambrian, VII (November 1887), 334-35.