They called it the Diamond City for the seam of black anthracite running under its streets. But for the better part of a century, if you walked the right blocks of Wilkes-Barre on a Sunday morning, you would have heard hymns sung in four-part harmony in a language that was not English. Welsh miners had brought it across the Atlantic with their lamps and their hymnals. By 1900, the Wyoming Valley held one of the largest Welsh-speaking populations anywhere outside Wales itself.
This is how they got here, what they built, and what is left when the mines close and the language fades.
Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley, the Place
Wilkes-Barre sits in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, cradled in the long bend of the Susquehanna River. The Wyoming Valley runs roughly twenty miles from Pittston in the north to Nanticoke in the south, with Wilkes-Barre at its civic heart and Scranton a short drive up the Lackawanna River.
The valley is narrow, ringed by forested ridges, and laid out along the river in a string of row houses, brick churches, and small civic squares. Public Square anchors the downtown, four city blocks shaped into a park since 1909, with the Luzerne County Courthouse rising over the river on one side.
This was an industrial town built on hard coal. The houses are mostly frame and brick, the streets are tight, and almost every neighbourhood backs onto an old colliery, a culm bank, or the ghost of one.
How Wilkes-Barre Became Welsh
Before the Welsh
The valley was Lenape and Susquehannock country first, then disputed ground in the eighteenth century between Connecticut settlers under the Susquehanna Company and Pennsylvania proprietors. Major John Durkee laid out the town in 1769 and named it for two Members of Parliament, John Wilkes and Isaac Barre, who had defended the American colonies in London.
For its first fifty years Wilkes-Barre was a small farming and milling settlement on the river. The change came underground.
In 1808 a local judge named Jesse Fell proved that the strange stone-like coal in the valley walls could burn on an open grate in a domestic hearth. Anthracite was clean, hot, smokeless, and abundant, and the Wyoming Valley sat on top of the richest seam of it in the country.
The Welsh Arrive
Coal seams of that quality needed a particular kind of labour. Anthracite is locked into steep, faulted, hard-rock seams, and getting it out required deep shafts and miners who knew what they were doing underground. In the 1820s and 1830s, exactly one place in the world had that skill in concentration: the South Wales coalfield.
The first Welsh miners began arriving in the Wyoming Valley in the 1820s and 1830s, recruited or self-recruited from Glamorganshire, Monmouthshire, and the iron and coal towns of Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare, and Dowlais. North Wales sent its own contingent, slate-quarrymen and lead-miners from Gwynedd looking for steadier wages.
They came with hand tools they understood, with chapels they intended to build, and with the certainty that they were the only men in America who could open the anthracite veins properly. The mine owners agreed. For most of the nineteenth century the inside foremen and skilled hewers of the Wyoming Valley were overwhelmingly Welsh.
Chain migration did the rest. One brother sent for the next, a father wrote home to Brynmawr or Aberystwyth, and entire chapel families crossed the ocean together to settle on the same street in Wilkes-Barre or in Hyde Park up the valley in Scranton.
The Valley at Its Peak
By the turn of the twentieth century the Wyoming Valley held what was almost certainly the largest concentration of Welsh people anywhere in the world outside Wales and the English border counties. The 1900 census counted nearly 5,000 Wales-born residents in Scranton alone and more than 2,000 in Wilkes-Barre, with thousands more in the surrounding boroughs of Plymouth, Edwardsville, Kingston, and Nanticoke. Add the American-born children and the second generation, and the Welsh-speaking community across the valley ran to tens of thousands.
This was a community that built itself in chapel-shaped pieces. The First Welsh Presbyterian Church in Wilkes-Barre was organised in 1864. The Second Welsh Presbyterian followed in 1874, the Second Welsh Congregational not long after, and a roster of Welsh Baptist and Welsh Independent chapels filled out the map.
Services were in Welsh. Sunday schools were in Welsh. The hymns, four-part harmony rolling through small wooden chapels, were the hymns of Williams Pantycelyn and Ann Griffiths sung exactly as they were sung in Bethesda or Treorchy.
Around the chapels grew the rest of the culture. The annual Eisteddfod, the Welsh competitive festival of music, poetry, and oratory, became a fixed point of the valley calendar. Wilkes-Barre and Scranton hosted some of the largest Eisteddfodau in North America during the 1880s and 1890s, drawing thousand-voice choirs and competitors from across the United States and Wales.
The Cymanfa Ganu, the great Welsh hymn-sing, filled chapel halls every spring. Saint David’s Day on the first of March was as fixed in the valley as the Fourth of July, marked with daffodils, leeks, banquets, and recitations of poetry in Welsh. The St. David’s Society of the Wyoming Valley, founded in 1883, held its banquets year after year and is still meeting today, more than 140 banquets later.
Welsh-language print sustained all of it. Y Drych, The Mirror, was founded in 1851 and ran for over a century as the leading Welsh-language newspaper in North America, read in every Welsh kitchen from Utica to Nanticoke. The Scranton-based Baner America served the valley directly in the 1860s and 1870s before merging into the national press.
The Change
Two things ended the Welsh Wyoming Valley, and neither was sudden.
The first was the slow, structural decline of anthracite. Oil and natural gas displaced hard coal in American home heating from the 1920s onward. The 1925 to 1926 anthracite strike crippled the market, and the Great Depression accelerated the loss.
The mines kept running through the Second World War, but by the 1950s the industry was visibly tired. Then, on 22 January 1959, the Susquehanna River broke through the roof of the Knox Coal Company’s River Slope mine at Port Griffith, just upriver from Wilkes-Barre. Twelve men died, and the river poured into miles of interconnected workings.
The Knox Mine Disaster effectively finished deep anthracite mining in the northern field. The Pennsylvania Coal Company and other operators withdrew within months, and by the 1970s no underground mines were extracting anthracite from the valley at all.
The second thing was assimilation. Welsh-speaking parents had raised English-speaking children for decades, and the chapels switched to English services through the early twentieth century. New waves of Polish, Slovak, Italian, and Lithuanian miners crowded into the valley between 1880 and 1920, and the Welsh, who had arrived first and held the skilled jobs, moved out of the patch towns and into professional and managerial work as fast as they could.
By the 1980s the last fluent Welsh speakers in the valley were elderly, and the chapels that had been organised in Welsh were either English-speaking, merged, or closed. The community had not disappeared. It had simply, generation by generation, become American.
The Landmarks of Welsh Wilkes-Barre
First Welsh Presbyterian Church, 35 Public Square, Wilkes-Barre. Organised in 1864 as a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist congregation, this is the oldest of the Welsh churches in the city and the one most directly descended from the founding generation of miners. Services were conducted entirely in Welsh for its first decades. The building still stands on Public Square and still bears the word “Welsh” in its name, more than 160 years after the first congregation gathered.
Second Welsh Presbyterian Church, Wilkes-Barre. Founded in 1874 as the Welsh community in the valley grew large enough to need a second Calvinistic Methodist congregation, the Second Welsh marked the high point of Welsh ecclesiastical organisation in Wilkes-Barre. Its centennial in October 1974 was the last of the great Welsh-language anniversary services. The building eventually merged its work into other Presbyterian congregations as the Welsh-speaking generation passed on.
Public Square, Downtown Wilkes-Barre. The civic centre of the city, four blocks designed in 1772 and turned into a park in 1909. For the Welsh community, the Square was the meeting point on Saint David’s Day and the home corner of the First Welsh Presbyterian Church.
The Westmoreland Club, 59 South Franklin Street, Wilkes-Barre. The St. David’s Society of the Wyoming Valley has held its annual Saint David’s Day banquet at the Westmoreland for decades, including its 147th banquet in 2026. The dinner opens with the Welsh national anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, and is the most reliable place in Wilkes-Barre to hear a room sing in Welsh.
The Anthracite Heritage Museum, McDade Park, Scranton. A short drive up the valley, the museum tells the story of the hard-coal industry the Welsh miners opened and ran. Its exhibits on deep-shaft engineering and the patch towns place the Welsh contribution alongside the Irish, Polish, Slovak, Italian, and Lithuanian families who followed.
The Knox Mine Disaster Historical Marker, Port Griffith. A roadside marker near the old Knox shaft commemorates the 22 January 1959 inundation that ended deep anthracite mining in the Wyoming Valley. For Welsh-American families whose grandfathers had worked these seams, this is the date the chapter closed.
Hyde Park, Scranton. Up the valley in Scranton, Hyde Park was the densest Welsh enclave in North America at the turn of the twentieth century. Its chapels, Welsh-language print shops, and Eisteddfod halls fed the smaller Welsh community in Wilkes-Barre, and many local Welsh families still have chapel kin there.
Where the Wyoming Valley Welsh Came From
The bulk of the Wilkes-Barre Welsh came from the South Wales coalfield. Glamorganshire, especially the Rhondda, Aberdare, and Merthyr Tydfil, sent thousands of skilled hewers and pit foremen to anthracite Pennsylvania. Monmouthshire and Carmarthenshire contributed their share, alongside the iron towns of the Heads of the Valleys.
From North Wales came a smaller but distinct stream: slate-quarrymen from Gwynedd around Bethesda, and lead-miners from Cardiganshire. Many were Welsh-speaking Calvinistic Methodists or Baptists, and they slotted directly into the chapel network.
The Brynmawr-to-Scranton connection became so well established by the 1860s that whole streets in Hyde Park were said to have been settled by extended families from a single Monmouthshire town. In the Rhondda, the small port of Porth still has an area locally called America Fach, Little America, a memory of how many of its sons had spent years in Pennsylvania.
Wilkes-Barre Today
Wilkes-Barre in the mid-2020s is a city of about 44,000 people, smaller than it was at its anthracite peak but holding steady, with a working-class economy that has shifted into healthcare, education, distribution, and small manufacturing. The dominant living ancestries today are Polish, Irish, Italian, and a growing Hispanic community. The Welsh, in census terms, are a small minority.
And yet the Welsh signature is still there if you know where to look. The First Welsh Presbyterian still meets on Public Square. The St. David’s Society of the Wyoming Valley still holds its banquet at the Westmoreland Club every March, opening with the Welsh national anthem. The Welsh Cultural Endeavor of Northeastern Pennsylvania maintains an active programme of Cymanfa Ganu hymn-sings, Welsh-language classes, and heritage events through Wilkes-Barre and Scranton.
You will not hear Welsh on the street in Wilkes-Barre any more. You will hear it, once a year, sung in four-part harmony in a function room above a city square, by the children and grandchildren of miners who came from Glamorganshire to a valley that needed exactly what they knew. That is not a small thing. It is the shape a community takes after the work ends and the language goes quiet, and it is still recognisably theirs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Welsh settle in Wilkes-Barre?
The Welsh settled in Wilkes-Barre and the wider Wyoming Valley from the 1820s onward because the region’s anthracite coal industry needed skilled deep-mine labour, and the South Wales coalfield was the only place in the world where that skill existed in concentration. Welsh miners were recruited as hewers, fire bosses, and inside foremen, and chain migration from Glamorganshire, Monmouthshire, and North Wales did the rest. By 1900 the valley held one of the largest Welsh-speaking populations outside Wales itself.
Are the Welsh still in Wilkes-Barre today?
The Welsh community in Wilkes-Barre is much smaller and more assimilated than it was a century ago, but it has not disappeared. The First Welsh Presbyterian Church still meets on Public Square, the St. David’s Society of the Wyoming Valley still holds its annual Saint David’s Day banquet, and the Welsh Cultural Endeavor of Northeastern Pennsylvania runs Cymanfa Ganu hymn-sings and Welsh-language classes across the valley. Welsh as a spoken everyday language has effectively gone, but the cultural infrastructure is intact.
What are the most famous Welsh landmarks in Wilkes-Barre?
The most important Welsh landmarks in Wilkes-Barre are the First Welsh Presbyterian Church on Public Square, founded in 1864, and the Westmoreland Club at 59 South Franklin Street, where the St. David’s Society of the Wyoming Valley has held its Saint David’s Day banquet for more than 140 years. Public Square itself was the gathering point for Welsh civic life, and the Knox Mine Disaster historical marker at nearby Port Griffith commemorates the 1959 flood that ended deep anthracite mining in the valley.
Where in Wales did the Wilkes-Barre Welsh come from?
Most of the Wilkes-Barre Welsh came from the South Wales coalfield, especially Glamorganshire (the Rhondda, Aberdare, and Merthyr Tydfil) and Monmouthshire, with smaller contingents from Carmarthenshire. A distinct second stream came from North Wales, particularly the slate-quarrying districts of Gwynedd around Bethesda and the lead-mining areas of Cardiganshire. The Brynmawr-to-Scranton connection in Monmouthshire became one of the best-documented chain-migration routes of the nineteenth century.
When did the Welsh first arrive in Wilkes-Barre?
The first Welsh miners began arriving in the Wyoming Valley in the 1820s and 1830s, soon after Jesse Fell demonstrated in 1808 that anthracite coal could be burned on an open grate. Welsh migration peaked between the 1850s and the 1900s, by which point the 1900 census recorded more than 2,000 Wales-born residents in Wilkes-Barre alone and nearly 5,000 in Scranton, with the Welsh-speaking community across the wider valley running to tens of thousands when American-born children were included.
If your family’s story passed through Wilkes-Barre, or any of the anthracite towns the Welsh helped open, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the chapels of Glamorganshire to the collieries of the Wyoming Valley, to wherever you are now.