Location: US 117 north of Burgaw
County: Pender
Original Date Cast: 1948
In the mid-1730s, a group of Welsh settlers established themselves in New Hanover County in an area known as the Welsh Tract. A record from March 1737 states that the tract extended from “Burgaw Creek to Widow Moore’s on the Black River, and then to the bounds of the precinct, embracing Duplin and Sampson counties.” A 1738 map of North Carolina shows two Welsh settlements, one on the northeast Cape Fear River in Duplin County, the other on the Cape Fear in Pender County.
Little is known about the actual individuals who settled the area other than that the majority traveled to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. Apparently, many were second-generation, as their parents had arrived from Wales in the 1680s. The individuals who migrated to North Carolina did so primarily to take advantage of Parliament’s offering of bounties for people who would work in the naval stores industry of eastern North Carolina. Hugh Meredith, one of Benjamin Franklin’s printers, left Philadelphia to be with kinsmen on the tract. Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, numbers 129 and 130 dating from April-May 1731 give a detailed report on the country. It is generally believed that Meredith wrote the account.
References:
William S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries (1989)
Lloyd Johnson, “The Welsh in the Carolinas in the Eighteenth Century,” North American Journal of Welsh Studies, IV (2004), 12-19
Samuel A. Ashe, History of North Carolina, I (1908)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771)
(Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Gazette (April-May 1731)