The Landmarks of Welsh Remsen and Steuben
The Stone Meeting House (Capel Cerrig), Prospect Street, Remsen. Built in 1831 as a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church, this plain two-storey stone building in the Vernacular Federal style is the surviving heart of Welsh Remsen. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, it is now the headquarters of the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and holds one of the largest Welsh libraries in America.
Capel Ucha, Starr Hill Road, Steuben. Founded in 1820, this Welsh Congregationalist chapel no longer stands, but a monument marks its place in the Capel Ucha Cemetery on the Steuben and Trenton town line. The first burial recorded here was Gwenn Jones, daughter of William C. Jones, who died in 1798, before the chapel itself was even raised.
The grave of the Reverend Robert Everett, Capel Ucha Cemetery. Everett arrived in Oneida County in 1823 and ministered to Capel Ucha and the nearby Penymynydd congregation. From 1840 he published the antislavery monthly Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (The American Messenger), served as an Underground Railroad stationmaster, and translated Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe into Welsh. He was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame in 2022 and lies buried here where he preached.
The Utica print shop of Y Drych. Not in Remsen itself but inseparable from it, the Welsh-American national newspaper made Utica its home from 1861. For the scattered farm families of the hills, the paper arriving each week was the thread that tied them to Wales and to one another.
The Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. Held each autumn in the village, this long-running festival is where the Welsh past meets the living present. The St. David’s Society of Utica has kept a booth here to share the county’s Welsh story, and the festival has donated tens of thousands of dollars to preserve the Stone Meeting House.
The annual Gymanfa Ganu. The communal hymn-sing still gathers people to raise four-part harmony in the old way. It is the single most enduring Welsh tradition in the region, carried by the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and the St. David’s Society alike.
Where the Remsen Welsh Came From
These were people of North Wales above all. The uncleared hill country of Oneida County drew settlers chiefly from the northern counties, places like Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire, where small tenant farms and chapel life shaped the same rhythms the immigrants rebuilt in America.
The records carry the home places with them. One settler is noted as John H. Evans, formerly of Llanrhaiadr, now of Remsen, and others trace back to spots like Dolgelley in Merionethshire. They came as farmers and chapel folk, and they sought out land and neighbours who spoke their language, exactly as so many immigrant communities have done. The same instinct that drew Welsh families to these hills later drew the Bosnian community of Utica, New York to the same county more than a century on.
Remsen and Steuben Today
Remsen is a small village now, quiet in the Adirondack foothills, no longer counting its population in Welsh-speaking thousands. The farms have thinned and the daily sound of spoken Welsh is long gone. What survives is deliberate, kept alive by people who refuse to let it fade.
The Stone Meeting House still stands on Prospect Street, the Remsen Steuben Historical Society inside it, the Welsh library on its shelves. The building is actively cared for: a recent campaign raised funds to replace its failing roof, the old slate from 1888 finally giving way, with major gifts from the Remsen Development Corporation and the Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. The society took part in the MV Gives 2025 giving day to keep the work going.
Once a year the hymns return at the Gymanfa Ganu, and each autumn the Barn Festival fills the village. The Welsh in Remsen, New York are no longer a population. They are a heritage, tended like a garden, and on the right weekend you can still hear the hills sing. Like the Welsh of Pennsylvania or the Cornish miners of Butte, Montana, this is a community whose story did not end at the harbour. It simply changed shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Welsh settle in Remsen, New York?
The Welsh in Remsen, New York came chiefly for cheap, ownable farmland in the Oneida County hills, something almost impossible to obtain in Wales. Poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and the dream of a freehold farm pushed families to emigrate, and each settler drew the next from the same North Wales valleys.
Is Remsen still Welsh today?
Remsen is no longer a Welsh-speaking community, but its heritage is actively preserved. The Stone Meeting House on Prospect Street houses the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and a major Welsh library, and traditions like the annual Gymanfa Ganu hymn-sing keep the culture alive.
What are the most famous Welsh landmarks in Remsen and Steuben?
The best-known is the Stone Meeting House, or Capel Cerrig, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church built in 1831 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Capel Ucha Cemetery in Steuben, where the Reverend Robert Everett is buried, is the other key Welsh site.
Where in Wales did the Remsen Welsh come from?
They came overwhelmingly from North Wales, especially Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire. These were farming and chapel-going families from small tenant holdings who rebuilt their language and worship on the Oneida hills.
When did the Welsh first arrive in Remsen?
The first group of about twelve Welsh families left Wales in March 1795 and reached central New York after a fourteen-week voyage. From that small founding settlement the Welsh in Remsen, New York grew until they made up three-quarters of the town by 1850.
If your family’s story passed through the Welsh hills of Remsen and Steuben, or any of the places the Welsh made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenant farm in Caernarfonshire to a dairy herd in Oneida County, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
For more on the buildings and people in this story, see the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church on Wikipedia and the Remsen Steuben Historical Society.
Remsen and Steuben at Their Peak
The numbers tell the story. By 1850 it was estimated that three-quarters of Remsen were Welsh. By 1859, seven-eighths of the combined population of Remsen and Steuben were Welshmen, and by 1855 some four thousand Welsh people lived across Oneida County. People said Remsen and Steuben had become as thoroughly Welsh as the Palatine settlements of Schoharie County were German.
Daily life ran on the dairy. Welsh families bought small farms, milked cows, and made butter and cheese that travelled by rail to Utica markets. The work was Welsh, the talk at the creamery was Welsh, and so was Sunday.
Religion anchored everything. The hills filled with chapels, Calvinistic Methodist, Congregationalist, and Baptist, each a tight knot of families who worshipped, sang, and buried their dead together. The singing was not incidental. The cymanfa ganu, the great communal hymn-singing festival, and the eisteddfod, the competition in poetry and song, came across the ocean intact and flourished in the New World.
Utica, fifteen miles south, became the printing and cultural capital of this rural world. There Y Drych, founded in New York in 1851 and moved to Utica in 1861, grew into the principal Welsh-language newspaper in the United States. From a central New York print shop it carried news of Wales and of the Welsh in America to readers from Pennsylvania to the western territories.
The concentration here rivalled the great Welsh industrial colonies elsewhere. Where the coal and slate towns of Pennsylvania drew Welsh miners, as in the chapels and choirs of the Welsh community in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the close-knit Welsh of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Oneida hills drew Welsh farmers. Same language, same hymns, different work.
The Change
The decline was slow, not sudden. Welsh-language preaching faded across the generations as children grew up speaking English in American schools. Farm consolidation and the lure of better land and city wages drew the young away from the stony hill farms.
By the early twentieth century the chapels were emptying. Some closed, some merged, and the Welsh language slipped from the pulpit to the parlour to memory. Y Drych itself eventually moved on from Utica and shifted to English, the surest sign that the old immigrant world was passing.
There is no need to mourn it. The community did not vanish so much as fold into American life, leaving its names on the gravestones, its hymns in the air one weekend a year, and its stone chapels standing on the hills.
The Landmarks of Welsh Remsen and Steuben
The Stone Meeting House (Capel Cerrig), Prospect Street, Remsen. Built in 1831 as a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church, this plain two-storey stone building in the Vernacular Federal style is the surviving heart of Welsh Remsen. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, it is now the headquarters of the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and holds one of the largest Welsh libraries in America.
Capel Ucha, Starr Hill Road, Steuben. Founded in 1820, this Welsh Congregationalist chapel no longer stands, but a monument marks its place in the Capel Ucha Cemetery on the Steuben and Trenton town line. The first burial recorded here was Gwenn Jones, daughter of William C. Jones, who died in 1798, before the chapel itself was even raised.
The grave of the Reverend Robert Everett, Capel Ucha Cemetery. Everett arrived in Oneida County in 1823 and ministered to Capel Ucha and the nearby Penymynydd congregation. From 1840 he published the antislavery monthly Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (The American Messenger), served as an Underground Railroad stationmaster, and translated Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe into Welsh. He was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame in 2022 and lies buried here where he preached.
The Utica print shop of Y Drych. Not in Remsen itself but inseparable from it, the Welsh-American national newspaper made Utica its home from 1861. For the scattered farm families of the hills, the paper arriving each week was the thread that tied them to Wales and to one another.
The Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. Held each autumn in the village, this long-running festival is where the Welsh past meets the living present. The St. David’s Society of Utica has kept a booth here to share the county’s Welsh story, and the festival has donated tens of thousands of dollars to preserve the Stone Meeting House.
The annual Gymanfa Ganu. The communal hymn-sing still gathers people to raise four-part harmony in the old way. It is the single most enduring Welsh tradition in the region, carried by the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and the St. David’s Society alike.
Where the Remsen Welsh Came From
These were people of North Wales above all. The uncleared hill country of Oneida County drew settlers chiefly from the northern counties, places like Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire, where small tenant farms and chapel life shaped the same rhythms the immigrants rebuilt in America.
The records carry the home places with them. One settler is noted as John H. Evans, formerly of Llanrhaiadr, now of Remsen, and others trace back to spots like Dolgelley in Merionethshire. They came as farmers and chapel folk, and they sought out land and neighbours who spoke their language, exactly as so many immigrant communities have done. The same instinct that drew Welsh families to these hills later drew the Bosnian community of Utica, New York to the same county more than a century on.
Remsen and Steuben Today
Remsen is a small village now, quiet in the Adirondack foothills, no longer counting its population in Welsh-speaking thousands. The farms have thinned and the daily sound of spoken Welsh is long gone. What survives is deliberate, kept alive by people who refuse to let it fade.
The Stone Meeting House still stands on Prospect Street, the Remsen Steuben Historical Society inside it, the Welsh library on its shelves. The building is actively cared for: a recent campaign raised funds to replace its failing roof, the old slate from 1888 finally giving way, with major gifts from the Remsen Development Corporation and the Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. The society took part in the MV Gives 2025 giving day to keep the work going.
Once a year the hymns return at the Gymanfa Ganu, and each autumn the Barn Festival fills the village. The Welsh in Remsen, New York are no longer a population. They are a heritage, tended like a garden, and on the right weekend you can still hear the hills sing. Like the Welsh of Pennsylvania or the Cornish miners of Butte, Montana, this is a community whose story did not end at the harbour. It simply changed shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Welsh settle in Remsen, New York?
The Welsh in Remsen, New York came chiefly for cheap, ownable farmland in the Oneida County hills, something almost impossible to obtain in Wales. Poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and the dream of a freehold farm pushed families to emigrate, and each settler drew the next from the same North Wales valleys.
Is Remsen still Welsh today?
Remsen is no longer a Welsh-speaking community, but its heritage is actively preserved. The Stone Meeting House on Prospect Street houses the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and a major Welsh library, and traditions like the annual Gymanfa Ganu hymn-sing keep the culture alive.
What are the most famous Welsh landmarks in Remsen and Steuben?
The best-known is the Stone Meeting House, or Capel Cerrig, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church built in 1831 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Capel Ucha Cemetery in Steuben, where the Reverend Robert Everett is buried, is the other key Welsh site.
Where in Wales did the Remsen Welsh come from?
They came overwhelmingly from North Wales, especially Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire. These were farming and chapel-going families from small tenant holdings who rebuilt their language and worship on the Oneida hills.
When did the Welsh first arrive in Remsen?
The first group of about twelve Welsh families left Wales in March 1795 and reached central New York after a fourteen-week voyage. From that small founding settlement the Welsh in Remsen, New York grew until they made up three-quarters of the town by 1850.
If your family’s story passed through the Welsh hills of Remsen and Steuben, or any of the places the Welsh made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenant farm in Caernarfonshire to a dairy herd in Oneida County, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
For more on the buildings and people in this story, see the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church on Wikipedia and the Remsen Steuben Historical Society.
They called the high ground above Remsen the Welsh hills, and for once the name was plain truth. From the 1790s through the early twentieth century, if you climbed Starr Hill Road past the dairy farms in Steuben, you heard hymns sung in Welsh drifting out of plain stone chapels. The butter churned in those farmhouses fed Utica and beyond, but the singing was the thing people remembered. By 1850 it was reckoned that three-quarters of Remsen spoke the language of cymru before they spoke English.
This is the story of one of the most concentrated rural Welsh settlements in America: how the Welsh in Remsen, New York turned a corner of Oneida County into a piece of North Wales, and what still stands on those hills today.
Remsen and Steuben: The Place
Remsen sits in the northern reaches of Oneida County, in the Adirondack foothills about fifteen miles north of Utica in central New York. The town of Steuben lies just to the west, and together with neighbouring Trenton they form the heart of the old Welsh district.
This was never a city neighbourhood of tenements and trolleys. It was farm country: rolling, stony, hard to clear, threaded by dirt roads and dotted with frame farmhouses and small stone chapels. The Black River and the old railway line gave the village of Remsen its reason to exist, and the land around it gave the Welsh exactly what they had crossed an ocean to find.
How Remsen Became Welsh
Before the Welsh
Before the chapels and the dairy herds, this was Haudenosaunee land on the edge of the great Adirondack wilderness, opened to settlement only after the Revolution. The township took its English name from Henry Remsen, one of the original patentees, when it was set off from Herkimer County and erected at the same moment Oneida County itself was formed on March 15, 1798.
The neighbouring town carries an even grander name. It honours Baron Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian drillmaster who trained the Continental Army at Valley Forge and received a large land grant here as a reward. Steuben died on that grant in 1794, the year before the first Welsh families arrived to farm beside it.
The Welsh Arrive
In March 1795, about twelve Welsh families left their homeland, boarded ship, and crossed the Atlantic in a passage of fourteen weeks. They reached New York and pushed inland to the cheap, uncleared hills of Oneida County. That small founding group became the seed of everything that followed.
What pulled them was land. Poor harvests in Wales in 1789 and again in 1802, combined with the near-impossibility of ever owning a farm at home, made the prospect of cheap freehold acres irresistible. A Welsh farmer who would never own soil in Caernarfonshire could own a hundred acres in Steuben.
Around 1808 the families of David Manual, John James, Griffith I. Jones, John Owens, and Hugh Hughes, all from Wales, settled in and were followed by many more. Each letter home, each returning success story, pulled the next family across. This was chain migration in its purest form, neighbour following neighbour from the same valleys until whole parishes in North Wales had cousins in Oneida County.
Remsen and Steuben at Their Peak
The numbers tell the story. By 1850 it was estimated that three-quarters of Remsen were Welsh. By 1859, seven-eighths of the combined population of Remsen and Steuben were Welshmen, and by 1855 some four thousand Welsh people lived across Oneida County. People said Remsen and Steuben had become as thoroughly Welsh as the Palatine settlements of Schoharie County were German.
Daily life ran on the dairy. Welsh families bought small farms, milked cows, and made butter and cheese that travelled by rail to Utica markets. The work was Welsh, the talk at the creamery was Welsh, and so was Sunday.
Religion anchored everything. The hills filled with chapels, Calvinistic Methodist, Congregationalist, and Baptist, each a tight knot of families who worshipped, sang, and buried their dead together. The singing was not incidental. The cymanfa ganu, the great communal hymn-singing festival, and the eisteddfod, the competition in poetry and song, came across the ocean intact and flourished in the New World.
Utica, fifteen miles south, became the printing and cultural capital of this rural world. There Y Drych, founded in New York in 1851 and moved to Utica in 1861, grew into the principal Welsh-language newspaper in the United States. From a central New York print shop it carried news of Wales and of the Welsh in America to readers from Pennsylvania to the western territories.
The concentration here rivalled the great Welsh industrial colonies elsewhere. Where the coal and slate towns of Pennsylvania drew Welsh miners, as in the chapels and choirs of the Welsh community in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the close-knit Welsh of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Oneida hills drew Welsh farmers. Same language, same hymns, different work.
The Change
The decline was slow, not sudden. Welsh-language preaching faded across the generations as children grew up speaking English in American schools. Farm consolidation and the lure of better land and city wages drew the young away from the stony hill farms.
By the early twentieth century the chapels were emptying. Some closed, some merged, and the Welsh language slipped from the pulpit to the parlour to memory. Y Drych itself eventually moved on from Utica and shifted to English, the surest sign that the old immigrant world was passing.
There is no need to mourn it. The community did not vanish so much as fold into American life, leaving its names on the gravestones, its hymns in the air one weekend a year, and its stone chapels standing on the hills.
The Landmarks of Welsh Remsen and Steuben
The Stone Meeting House (Capel Cerrig), Prospect Street, Remsen. Built in 1831 as a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church, this plain two-storey stone building in the Vernacular Federal style is the surviving heart of Welsh Remsen. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, it is now the headquarters of the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and holds one of the largest Welsh libraries in America.
Capel Ucha, Starr Hill Road, Steuben. Founded in 1820, this Welsh Congregationalist chapel no longer stands, but a monument marks its place in the Capel Ucha Cemetery on the Steuben and Trenton town line. The first burial recorded here was Gwenn Jones, daughter of William C. Jones, who died in 1798, before the chapel itself was even raised.
The grave of the Reverend Robert Everett, Capel Ucha Cemetery. Everett arrived in Oneida County in 1823 and ministered to Capel Ucha and the nearby Penymynydd congregation. From 1840 he published the antislavery monthly Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (The American Messenger), served as an Underground Railroad stationmaster, and translated Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe into Welsh. He was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame in 2022 and lies buried here where he preached.
The Utica print shop of Y Drych. Not in Remsen itself but inseparable from it, the Welsh-American national newspaper made Utica its home from 1861. For the scattered farm families of the hills, the paper arriving each week was the thread that tied them to Wales and to one another.
The Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. Held each autumn in the village, this long-running festival is where the Welsh past meets the living present. The St. David’s Society of Utica has kept a booth here to share the county’s Welsh story, and the festival has donated tens of thousands of dollars to preserve the Stone Meeting House.
The annual Gymanfa Ganu. The communal hymn-sing still gathers people to raise four-part harmony in the old way. It is the single most enduring Welsh tradition in the region, carried by the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and the St. David’s Society alike.
Where the Remsen Welsh Came From
These were people of North Wales above all. The uncleared hill country of Oneida County drew settlers chiefly from the northern counties, places like Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire, where small tenant farms and chapel life shaped the same rhythms the immigrants rebuilt in America.
The records carry the home places with them. One settler is noted as John H. Evans, formerly of Llanrhaiadr, now of Remsen, and others trace back to spots like Dolgelley in Merionethshire. They came as farmers and chapel folk, and they sought out land and neighbours who spoke their language, exactly as so many immigrant communities have done. The same instinct that drew Welsh families to these hills later drew the Bosnian community of Utica, New York to the same county more than a century on.
Remsen and Steuben Today
Remsen is a small village now, quiet in the Adirondack foothills, no longer counting its population in Welsh-speaking thousands. The farms have thinned and the daily sound of spoken Welsh is long gone. What survives is deliberate, kept alive by people who refuse to let it fade.
The Stone Meeting House still stands on Prospect Street, the Remsen Steuben Historical Society inside it, the Welsh library on its shelves. The building is actively cared for: a recent campaign raised funds to replace its failing roof, the old slate from 1888 finally giving way, with major gifts from the Remsen Development Corporation and the Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. The society took part in the MV Gives 2025 giving day to keep the work going.
Once a year the hymns return at the Gymanfa Ganu, and each autumn the Barn Festival fills the village. The Welsh in Remsen, New York are no longer a population. They are a heritage, tended like a garden, and on the right weekend you can still hear the hills sing. Like the Welsh of Pennsylvania or the Cornish miners of Butte, Montana, this is a community whose story did not end at the harbour. It simply changed shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Welsh settle in Remsen, New York?
The Welsh in Remsen, New York came chiefly for cheap, ownable farmland in the Oneida County hills, something almost impossible to obtain in Wales. Poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and the dream of a freehold farm pushed families to emigrate, and each settler drew the next from the same North Wales valleys.
Is Remsen still Welsh today?
Remsen is no longer a Welsh-speaking community, but its heritage is actively preserved. The Stone Meeting House on Prospect Street houses the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and a major Welsh library, and traditions like the annual Gymanfa Ganu hymn-sing keep the culture alive.
What are the most famous Welsh landmarks in Remsen and Steuben?
The best-known is the Stone Meeting House, or Capel Cerrig, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church built in 1831 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Capel Ucha Cemetery in Steuben, where the Reverend Robert Everett is buried, is the other key Welsh site.
Where in Wales did the Remsen Welsh come from?
They came overwhelmingly from North Wales, especially Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire. These were farming and chapel-going families from small tenant holdings who rebuilt their language and worship on the Oneida hills.
When did the Welsh first arrive in Remsen?
The first group of about twelve Welsh families left Wales in March 1795 and reached central New York after a fourteen-week voyage. From that small founding settlement the Welsh in Remsen, New York grew until they made up three-quarters of the town by 1850.
If your family’s story passed through the Welsh hills of Remsen and Steuben, or any of the places the Welsh made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenant farm in Caernarfonshire to a dairy herd in Oneida County, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
For more on the buildings and people in this story, see the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church on Wikipedia and the Remsen Steuben Historical Society.
They called the high ground above Remsen the Welsh hills, and for once the name was plain truth. From the 1790s through the early twentieth century, if you climbed Starr Hill Road past the dairy farms in Steuben, you heard hymns sung in Welsh drifting out of plain stone chapels. The butter churned in those farmhouses fed Utica and beyond, but the singing was the thing people remembered. By 1850 it was reckoned that three-quarters of Remsen spoke the language of cymru before they spoke English.
This is the story of one of the most concentrated rural Welsh settlements in America: how the Welsh in Remsen, New York turned a corner of Oneida County into a piece of North Wales, and what still stands on those hills today.
Remsen and Steuben: The Place
Remsen sits in the northern reaches of Oneida County, in the Adirondack foothills about fifteen miles north of Utica in central New York. The town of Steuben lies just to the west, and together with neighbouring Trenton they form the heart of the old Welsh district.
This was never a city neighbourhood of tenements and trolleys. It was farm country: rolling, stony, hard to clear, threaded by dirt roads and dotted with frame farmhouses and small stone chapels. The Black River and the old railway line gave the village of Remsen its reason to exist, and the land around it gave the Welsh exactly what they had crossed an ocean to find.
How Remsen Became Welsh
Before the Welsh
Before the chapels and the dairy herds, this was Haudenosaunee land on the edge of the great Adirondack wilderness, opened to settlement only after the Revolution. The township took its English name from Henry Remsen, one of the original patentees, when it was set off from Herkimer County and erected at the same moment Oneida County itself was formed on March 15, 1798.
The neighbouring town carries an even grander name. It honours Baron Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian drillmaster who trained the Continental Army at Valley Forge and received a large land grant here as a reward. Steuben died on that grant in 1794, the year before the first Welsh families arrived to farm beside it.
The Welsh Arrive
In March 1795, about twelve Welsh families left their homeland, boarded ship, and crossed the Atlantic in a passage of fourteen weeks. They reached New York and pushed inland to the cheap, uncleared hills of Oneida County. That small founding group became the seed of everything that followed.
What pulled them was land. Poor harvests in Wales in 1789 and again in 1802, combined with the near-impossibility of ever owning a farm at home, made the prospect of cheap freehold acres irresistible. A Welsh farmer who would never own soil in Caernarfonshire could own a hundred acres in Steuben.
Around 1808 the families of David Manual, John James, Griffith I. Jones, John Owens, and Hugh Hughes, all from Wales, settled in and were followed by many more. Each letter home, each returning success story, pulled the next family across. This was chain migration in its purest form, neighbour following neighbour from the same valleys until whole parishes in North Wales had cousins in Oneida County.
Remsen and Steuben at Their Peak
The numbers tell the story. By 1850 it was estimated that three-quarters of Remsen were Welsh. By 1859, seven-eighths of the combined population of Remsen and Steuben were Welshmen, and by 1855 some four thousand Welsh people lived across Oneida County. People said Remsen and Steuben had become as thoroughly Welsh as the Palatine settlements of Schoharie County were German.
Daily life ran on the dairy. Welsh families bought small farms, milked cows, and made butter and cheese that travelled by rail to Utica markets. The work was Welsh, the talk at the creamery was Welsh, and so was Sunday.
Religion anchored everything. The hills filled with chapels, Calvinistic Methodist, Congregationalist, and Baptist, each a tight knot of families who worshipped, sang, and buried their dead together. The singing was not incidental. The cymanfa ganu, the great communal hymn-singing festival, and the eisteddfod, the competition in poetry and song, came across the ocean intact and flourished in the New World.
Utica, fifteen miles south, became the printing and cultural capital of this rural world. There Y Drych, founded in New York in 1851 and moved to Utica in 1861, grew into the principal Welsh-language newspaper in the United States. From a central New York print shop it carried news of Wales and of the Welsh in America to readers from Pennsylvania to the western territories.
The concentration here rivalled the great Welsh industrial colonies elsewhere. Where the coal and slate towns of Pennsylvania drew Welsh miners, as in the chapels and choirs of the Welsh community in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the close-knit Welsh of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Oneida hills drew Welsh farmers. Same language, same hymns, different work.
The Change
The decline was slow, not sudden. Welsh-language preaching faded across the generations as children grew up speaking English in American schools. Farm consolidation and the lure of better land and city wages drew the young away from the stony hill farms.
By the early twentieth century the chapels were emptying. Some closed, some merged, and the Welsh language slipped from the pulpit to the parlour to memory. Y Drych itself eventually moved on from Utica and shifted to English, the surest sign that the old immigrant world was passing.
There is no need to mourn it. The community did not vanish so much as fold into American life, leaving its names on the gravestones, its hymns in the air one weekend a year, and its stone chapels standing on the hills.
The Landmarks of Welsh Remsen and Steuben
The Stone Meeting House (Capel Cerrig), Prospect Street, Remsen. Built in 1831 as a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church, this plain two-storey stone building in the Vernacular Federal style is the surviving heart of Welsh Remsen. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, it is now the headquarters of the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and holds one of the largest Welsh libraries in America.
Capel Ucha, Starr Hill Road, Steuben. Founded in 1820, this Welsh Congregationalist chapel no longer stands, but a monument marks its place in the Capel Ucha Cemetery on the Steuben and Trenton town line. The first burial recorded here was Gwenn Jones, daughter of William C. Jones, who died in 1798, before the chapel itself was even raised.
The grave of the Reverend Robert Everett, Capel Ucha Cemetery. Everett arrived in Oneida County in 1823 and ministered to Capel Ucha and the nearby Penymynydd congregation. From 1840 he published the antislavery monthly Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (The American Messenger), served as an Underground Railroad stationmaster, and translated Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe into Welsh. He was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame in 2022 and lies buried here where he preached.
The Utica print shop of Y Drych. Not in Remsen itself but inseparable from it, the Welsh-American national newspaper made Utica its home from 1861. For the scattered farm families of the hills, the paper arriving each week was the thread that tied them to Wales and to one another.
The Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. Held each autumn in the village, this long-running festival is where the Welsh past meets the living present. The St. David’s Society of Utica has kept a booth here to share the county’s Welsh story, and the festival has donated tens of thousands of dollars to preserve the Stone Meeting House.
The annual Gymanfa Ganu. The communal hymn-sing still gathers people to raise four-part harmony in the old way. It is the single most enduring Welsh tradition in the region, carried by the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and the St. David’s Society alike.
Where the Remsen Welsh Came From
These were people of North Wales above all. The uncleared hill country of Oneida County drew settlers chiefly from the northern counties, places like Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire, where small tenant farms and chapel life shaped the same rhythms the immigrants rebuilt in America.
The records carry the home places with them. One settler is noted as John H. Evans, formerly of Llanrhaiadr, now of Remsen, and others trace back to spots like Dolgelley in Merionethshire. They came as farmers and chapel folk, and they sought out land and neighbours who spoke their language, exactly as so many immigrant communities have done. The same instinct that drew Welsh families to these hills later drew the Bosnian community of Utica, New York to the same county more than a century on.
Remsen and Steuben Today
Remsen is a small village now, quiet in the Adirondack foothills, no longer counting its population in Welsh-speaking thousands. The farms have thinned and the daily sound of spoken Welsh is long gone. What survives is deliberate, kept alive by people who refuse to let it fade.
The Stone Meeting House still stands on Prospect Street, the Remsen Steuben Historical Society inside it, the Welsh library on its shelves. The building is actively cared for: a recent campaign raised funds to replace its failing roof, the old slate from 1888 finally giving way, with major gifts from the Remsen Development Corporation and the Remsen Barn Festival of the Arts. The society took part in the MV Gives 2025 giving day to keep the work going.
Once a year the hymns return at the Gymanfa Ganu, and each autumn the Barn Festival fills the village. The Welsh in Remsen, New York are no longer a population. They are a heritage, tended like a garden, and on the right weekend you can still hear the hills sing. Like the Welsh of Pennsylvania or the Cornish miners of Butte, Montana, this is a community whose story did not end at the harbour. It simply changed shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Welsh settle in Remsen, New York?
The Welsh in Remsen, New York came chiefly for cheap, ownable farmland in the Oneida County hills, something almost impossible to obtain in Wales. Poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and the dream of a freehold farm pushed families to emigrate, and each settler drew the next from the same North Wales valleys.
Is Remsen still Welsh today?
Remsen is no longer a Welsh-speaking community, but its heritage is actively preserved. The Stone Meeting House on Prospect Street houses the Remsen Steuben Historical Society and a major Welsh library, and traditions like the annual Gymanfa Ganu hymn-sing keep the culture alive.
What are the most famous Welsh landmarks in Remsen and Steuben?
The best-known is the Stone Meeting House, or Capel Cerrig, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist church built in 1831 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Capel Ucha Cemetery in Steuben, where the Reverend Robert Everett is buried, is the other key Welsh site.
Where in Wales did the Remsen Welsh come from?
They came overwhelmingly from North Wales, especially Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, Anglesey, and Denbighshire. These were farming and chapel-going families from small tenant holdings who rebuilt their language and worship on the Oneida hills.
When did the Welsh first arrive in Remsen?
The first group of about twelve Welsh families left Wales in March 1795 and reached central New York after a fourteen-week voyage. From that small founding settlement the Welsh in Remsen, New York grew until they made up three-quarters of the town by 1850.
If your family’s story passed through the Welsh hills of Remsen and Steuben, or any of the places the Welsh made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenant farm in Caernarfonshire to a dairy herd in Oneida County, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
For more on the buildings and people in this story, see the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church on Wikipedia and the Remsen Steuben Historical Society.