 | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(July 2022) |
Lewis Jones (30 January 1837 - 24 November 1904) was one of the founders of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia. The city of Trelew was named after him.
| | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(July 2022) |
Lewis Jones (30 January 1837 - 24 November 1904) was one of the founders of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia. The city of Trelew was named after him.
Jones was born in Caernarfon and worked as a printer in Holyhead, where he was co-editor of the Welsh periodical Y Punch Cymraeg. Later he moved to Liverpool and married Ellen Griffith in 1859.
While in Liverpool, he became one of the main leaders of the movement which was set up to establish a Welsh settlement in a suitable location, where Welsh emigrants could stay together and preserve their language and way of life. In 1862 Lewis Jones accompanied Captain Love Jones-Parry to Patagonia to investigate whether it was a suitable area for the project. They first visited Buenos Aires where they held discussions with the minister Guillermo Rawson then having come to an agreement headed south. They reached Patagonia in a small ship named the Candelaria, and were driven by a storm into a bay which they named "Porth Madryn" after Jones-Parry's estate in Wales. The town which grew near the spot where they landed is now named Puerto Madryn. They returned to Wales with a favourable report, which was further embellished by Lewis Jones in a series of speeches.
Lewis Jones and Edwyn Cynrig Roberts went to Patagonia ahead of the main party to prepare the ground, and were there to welcome the settlers when the Mimosa landed. However a quarrel broke out when some of the settlers complained that the land was by no means as suitable for settlement as Lewis Jones had claimed. Jones moved to Buenos Aires to work as a printer for a period, but when he heard in 1867 that some of the settlers were planning to leave Patagonia he returned to persuade them to stay. He set up a printing press and published two Welsh newspapers, Ein Breiniad and Y Drafod. The Argentine government appointed him governor for a period, but he was also imprisoned for supporting the rights of the Welsh settlers against the government. In the 1870s he made a number of trips to explore the area beyond the Chubut valley.
Lewis Jones was the driving force behind the construction of a railway running up the Chubut valley from Puerto Madryn. In 1884 the Argentine Congress authorised the construction of the Central Chubut Railway by Lewis Jones y Cia. Raising funds locally to set up a company to build the railway proved difficult, so Lewis Jones went to the United Kingdom with his daughter Eluned to try to raise the money there. Initially he had little success, but on a train journey from London to Bangor the fact that he and Eluned were chatting in Spanish aroused the curiosity of a fellow passenger, Asahel P. Bell, an engineer. It was Bell who assisted them to set up the company in Liverpool. Work on the railway began in 1886, helped by the arrival of another 465 Welsh settlers on the steamer Vesta. The town which grew at the railhead was named Trelew in honour of Lewis Jones ("Tre" is the Welsh for "town"). The town grew rapidly and in 1888 became the headquarters of the "Compañía Mercantil del Chubut" (Chubut Trading Company).
Lewis Jones died in 1904, the year in which Trelew elected its first municipal authority, and was buried in the Moriah cemetery by the River Chubut, facing Trelew. His daughter, Eluned Morgan, became a prominent figure in the life of the Welsh settlement, and is generally regarded as the finest Welsh language writer produced by Patagonia.
Y Wladfa, also occasionally Y Wladychfa Gymreig, refers to the establishment of settlements by Welsh immigrants in Patagonia, beginning in 1865, mainly along the coast of the lower Chubut Valley. In 1881, the area became part of the Chubut National Territory of Argentina which, in 1955, became Chubut Province.
Chubut is a province in southern Argentina, situated between the 42nd parallel south, the 46th parallel south, the Andes range to the west, and the Atlantic ocean to the east. The province's name derives from the Tehuelche word chupat, meaning "transparent," their description of the Chubut River.
Rawson is the capital of the Argentine province of Chubut, in Patagonia. It has 24,616 inhabitants in 2010, and it is the chief town of the Rawson Department.
Trelew is a city in the eastern part of the Chubut Province of Argentina. Located in Patagonia, the city is the largest and most populous in the low valley of the Chubut River, with 97,915 inhabitants as of 2010. The Trelew municipality is part of the Rawson Department, whose capital, Rawson, is also the provincial capital.
Puerto Madryn, also known as Madryn, is a city in the province of Chubut in Argentine Patagonia. It is the capital of the Viedma Department, and has about 93,995 inhabitants according to the last census in 2010.
Michael Daniel Jones was a Welsh Congregationalist minister and principal of a theological college, but is best remembered as a founder of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia known as Y Wladfa and as one of the fathers of modern Welsh nationalism.
Gaiman is a town in the Chubut Province of Patagonia in Argentina. It has a population of 6,627 as per the 2010 census [INDEC]. It is located in the River Chubut's lower valley, about 15 kilometres (9 mi) west of Trelew. Gaiman is a cultural and demographic centre of the main region of the Welsh settlement in Argentina, known in Welsh as Y Wladfa Gymreig.
Guillermo Rawson was a medical doctor and politician in nineteenth-century Argentina. In 1862, when he was the Interior Minister of Argentina, he met Captain Love Jones-Parry and Lewis Jones, who were on their way to Patagonia to investigate whether it was suitable for the creation of a Welsh settlement there. Rawson came to an agreement with them, and this resulted in the creation of a colony in the Chubut Valley in the following years. The city of Rawson, the capital of the province of Chubut, was named after him.
The Chubut River is located in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina. Its name comes from the Tehuelche word chupat, which means "transparent". The Argentine Chubut Province, through which the river flows, is named after it. Welsh settlers called the river "Afon Camwy", meaning "twisting river".
Sir Thomas Duncombe Love Jones-Parry, 1st Baronet was a Welsh landowner and Liberal politician. He was one of the founders of the Y Wladfa settlement in Patagonia, South America.
Choele Choel is the capital of the department of Avellaneda in the Argentine province of Río Negro, and the most important settlement within the Valle Medio agricultural area of the Río Negro River in Patagonia.
The Tehuelche people, also called the Aónikenk, are an indigenous people from eastern Patagonia in South America. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Tehuelche were influenced by Mapuche people, and many adopted a horseriding lifestyle. Once a nomadic people, the lands of the Tehuelche were colonized in the 19th century by Argentina and Chile, gradually disrupting their traditional economies. The establishment of large sheep farming estates in Patagonia was particularly detrimental to the Tehuelche. Contact with outsiders also brought in infectious diseases ushering deadly epidemics among Tehuelche tribes. Most existing members of the group currently reside in cities and towns of Argentine Patagonia.
Mimosa was a clipper ship best known for carrying the first Welsh emigrants to South America in 1865.
Mario das Neves was an Argentine politician who was twice governor of Chubut Province, from 2003 to 2011 and again from 2015 until his death in 2017.
Patagonian Welsh is a variety of the Welsh language spoken in Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, Chubut Province, Argentina. The decimal numeral system used in Modern Welsh originated in Patagonia in the 1870s, and was subsequently adopted in Wales in the 1940s as a simpler counterpart to the traditional vigesimal system, which still survives in Wales.
Eluned Morgan, was a Welsh-language author from Patagonia. She was raised in Y Wladfa, a Welsh colony in Patagonia, and was taught to speak both Welsh and Spanish. Her father eventually enrolled her in Dr Williams' School in Wales, where she had to learn the English language. She led student protests against the school's English-only policy, which prohibited the use of Welsh by its students.
The Central Chubut Railway was a British-owned company that built and operated a 1,000 mmmetre gauge railway line in the Argentine province of Chubut in the Patagonia region at the end of the 19th. century.
Ferrocarriles Patagónicos was an Argentine State-owned railway company that built and operated several rail lines in Patagonia region. FP were part of the Argentine State Railway created in 1909 during the presidency of José Figueroa Alcorta.
Foreign relations between the Argentine Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have existed for over a century.
The Península Valdés Railway was an Argentine narrow gauge railway that joined the city of Puerto Pirámides with the salt evaporation pond known as Salinas Grandes, both in Chubut Province. The railway operated passenger and freight services, with two intermediate stops.
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