From Wales to West Virginia

By Nancy Edwards Buell

Wales is a part of Great Britain on the western side of England. It had rocky soil, cold weather and too many people in the early 1790s. Taxes were high to pay for the English Wars. About half of its people were farmers. The future for many would be to go somewhere else and start over. In the young United States the Revolutionary War was over, commerce was growing and there was a need for young workers. 

Thomas Edwards and Elizabeth went to Liverpool, England which was the nearest seaport for ships sailing to America. They were married before the ship sailed in the fall of 1827. It was a trip of about 3000 miles, over 4 weeks and they had to provide their own food on board. Most of their luggage was food for the trip which might have been smoked meats, dried fruit, cheese and hard tac bread. The ship only provided a bed and water. The cost of passage would be the sale of their labor for 7 years to someone at the ship’s destination which was New York City. It was the largest city in the United States at over 200,000 people. They became indentured servants. Their new home turned out to be Albany, New York, just north up the Hudson River. 

During the next seven years they lived in the 5th Ward of Albany which was the outskirts of town. He worked on a farm and Elizabeth was a household worker. The Erie Canal had recently been completed and it ended in Albany. This was now the main outlet for goods and raw material coming from as far away as the Great Lakes. Albany, N.Y. was the 9th largest and one of the busiest cities in the United States in 1825 

A son was born in June, 1828 and by 1835 the indenture contract was fulfilled. The Edwards family could continue with plans and hopes for the future. Somehow they walked, rode or floated to Ohio by 1840. They became tenant farmers for a land owner in Monroe county. The Farm Census of 1850 showed the Edwards to be very successful. They had a team of horses, a cow, 3 hogs and raised tobacco as a cash crop. They also added two daughters to their family. 

Their son, Thomas, now in his 20s, married a neighbor’s daughter, Lavinia Knapp, in 1853 and started his family nearby. Soon the family increased, John Wesley (b.1854), Sarah (b.1856), Richard Lee (b.1858), Mary Jane (b.1860) and Barbara (b.1862). They too were tenant farmers but not land owners. Most of the Ohio country was already owned by earlier settlers. 

Both Edwards families moved into the new Noble County in the 1860s near Carlisle. They were still working together when the Civil War began in 1861. The younger Thomas avoided military service until early in 1865 when he enlisted in February in the 184th Ohio Volunteers. He was thirty seven years old and had a family with five children. 

Thomas was given a cash bounty of $100 for a one year enlistment. His family lived with his parents and sisters during his time in the army. He served in Tennessee until the fall of 1865 when the army was disbanded and he was sent home. The next four years were a time of planning and saving for the future. They also added two more children George in 1866 and Olive in 1868. The $100 in bounty money would be their cash start worth almost $2000 in today’s money. 

Sometime in the spring of 1869, Thomas and his family joined several other families looking for a better life. They had heard of good farm land that could be bought in the new Lincoln county in West Virginia. Maybe information from another ex-soldier or news from a circuit riding preacher with the Methodist Church to which they all belonged. They loaded wagons with everything they could take and headed toward Charleston, West Virginia along a road which became Interstate 77. They crossed two rivers, the Ohio and the Kanawha at St Albans. Then it was a short distance into Lincoln County, West Virginia. The elder Edwards stayed in Ohio with Thomas’s two sisters until the mother died sometime after 1870.

Thomas returned to Ohio to get his sisters and say goodbye to his father. It must have been a very emotional visit! The elder Thomas remained at home until he could no longer care for himself and then he entered the Noble County Infirmary where he died in February 1874. The younger Thomas and Lavinia had two more children in Lincoln county, Albert (b.1871) and Alfred (b.1872). The Edwards descendants finally became land owners in West Virginia after the Civil War.