The Welsh Tract of the Cape Fear

Around seventeen thirty, a wave of Welsh settlers moved south from Pennsylvania and put down roots in this stretch of country between the Northeast Cape Fear and Cape Fear rivers. Many were second-generation Americans whose parents had crossed from Wales in the sixteen eighties. Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette published detailed accounts of the settlement in seventeen thirty-one, and the community grew to span eighty or ninety miles along the Cape Fear creeks.

The Welsh helped found some of the colony's earliest Presbyterian congregations in the seventeen thirties and forties. Their surnames, Morgan, Edwards, Thomas, Evans, Jones, and Williams, still appear on gravestones in the churchyards of Duplin County today, quiet testimony to one of the Cape Fear region's least-remembered founding peoples.