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Welsh Tract Settlement

By Helen Campbell

It has been said of Pennsylvania that no other American colony had "such a mixture of languages, nationalities and religions. Dutch, Swedes, English, Germans, Scotch-Irish and Welsh; Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Tunkers and Moravians all had a share in creating it" (Fisher).

In 1681 Dr. Edward Jones and John Thomas formed the Welsh Tract when they purchased 5,000 acres of land west of the Schuylkill River, Pennsylvania from William Penn. In modern times the area is known as the Lower Merion. In the following years many Welsh speaking Quaker Baptist made the journey across the sea to found a new colony of Welsh Quakers.

By the year 1690, Welsh Baptists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians, as well as English and German settlers, made their homes on the Welsh Tract too. By the time of the American Revolutionary War there were approximately twelve thousand people of Welsh ancestry living in Pennsylvania. The Welsh eventually married into the English, their ethnic origins blending in with the English. As the colony grew some of the Welsh sold their land and moved to other areas such as Delaware, New Jersey and Virginia.

1729 he Welsh Society of Philadelphia was formed to help immigrants coming to America from Wales. It was the custom among the Welsh in their native land to take the first name of their father as their family name but the new immigrants to America usually made it their surname. Thus John ap Evan, John the son of Evan, became John Bevan, and Richard ap Thomas became Richard Thomas, etc. The Welsh Tract Baptist Church is the oldest of the Primitive Baptist churches in America.

My ancestor William David was amongst these early settlers. William was a student at Oxford University for two years. He became a Quaker at Oxford and sailed with other followers on William Penn, arriving at Philadelphia, PA in 1684. William's surname changed to Davis after arriving to America. He was a recognized preacher of the Society of Friends when he arrived, but left with George Keith and 46 others in 1691. In 1697, he joined the Pennapek Baptist Church from which he was expelled February 17, 1698/9 for heresy. (Don Norman) Sometime after that the David/Davis and allied families became known as Seventh Day Baptist. Many of these Welsh families eventually migrated to West Virginia, in the counties of Monongahela and Harrison. Caleb Davis was born in 1746 in Cedar Creek Hundred, Sussex County, DE and was living there in a 1790 Census. He is buried in the Davis Ridge Cemetery on Little Mill Road in Marion County, West Virginia. The Seven Day Baptist congregation was a close knit community, marriages outside of the Quaker community was strongly opposed. This practice led to cousins marry second, third and at times first cousins.