Welsh Journals

Earth County. Later in the same year, Evans and Roberts, joined by Edward S. Evans Jr., Elizabeth Evans, and Griffith Jones, arrived at Ottawa. D. C. Evans returned to South Bend, where he intended to establish a town (and eventually did so) with the assistance of a fellow citizen of La Crosse, the Rev. Richard Davies, who publicized the venture in the Welsh and Welsh-American press and eventually came to live at the settlement himself. Evans had the town divided into blocks and lots in December and then returned to Ohio, leaving John Jones of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in charge. The first real settlers (Evan J. and David Lewis, and John A. Jones) arrived early in 1855, and almost immediately religious activities commenced. In April there were prayer meetings, and in May the Rev. Davies arrived and preached the first Welsh sermon in Minnesota-possibly the first west of the Mississippi-and established an inter-denominational church. These were the first Welsh to come to the area unless the Daniel Williams and John James who were the first settlers in Mankato a year earlier were Welsh, as Thomas Hughes suggests. South Bend was a rare example of a mid-west town established by Welsh settlers. Although there are no traces of it today, in 1858 it had an hotel, two mills, five stores and about fifty houses. It was said that it 'rivalled' Mankato, but as the Rev. Owen Thomas was to report in the 1920s, 'This had been a lively place, but inasmuch as Mankato was so near, the buildings got torn down'.2 The present town of South Bend is apparently not located on the site of the old town, but it was approximately where the Le Hillier section of modern Mankato is situated. Although other small groups and individuals joined the original settlers, a great influx of 121 Welsh-Americans arrived in a group in April or May 1856, most of them from Jackson County (although some were from adjoining Gallia County), Ohio, and originally from Cardiganshire. They had travelled from Ohio on the river to Cairo and up to Minneapolis, and then down the Minnesota River to South Bend. While some of the Ohioans settled in, or near, the small town of South Bend, most of them were forced to move slightly further west to Judson and Cambria townships and south-west to the Cottonwood and Butternut Valley areas where inexpensive government land was available. Since most of these people were, like the Rev. Davies (born in Wales, but who had himself once lived in Jackson County, Ohio), members of the Welsh-speaking Calvinistic Methodist church, it is not This material about the early days mainly derives from History of the Welsh in Minnesota and Hanes Cymry Minnesota, edited by the Rev. Thomas E. Hughes et al. (Mankato, 1895). 2 Rev. Owen Thomas, 'Nodion o Iowa' [Notes from Iowa], Y Drych, 3 October 1924 (my translation).