Welsh place names: Merion

29 August 2008

Merion

Merion is a community in Pennsylvania. It is in Lower Merion Township. It is contiguous to Philadelphia and is also bordered by Wynnewood, Narberth, and Bala Cynwyd. Merion Meeting House was built at the present intersection of Montgomery Avenue and Meetinghouse Lane in 1695 by Welsh settlers.

An important institution in Merion is the Barnes Foundation, an art display housed in a mansion on Latches Lane.

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The Welsh were added later

The Welsh Tract, also called the Welsh Barony, was a portion of Pennsylvania settled largely by Welsh-speaking Quakers. It covers 40,000 acres to the west of Philadelphia. The original settlers, led by John Roberts, negotiated with William Penn in 1684 to constitute the Tract as a separate county whose local government would use the Welsh language, since many of the settlers spoke no English. Notwithstanding this agreement, by the 1690s the land had already been partitioned into different counties, despite appeals from the Welsh settlers, and the Tract never gained self-government.
The Roberts and other Welsh families became influential in the area, through the building of mills and the eventual introduction of the railroad. It is the railroad that gives the best-known part of the area its current name — the Main Line, referring to the main track of the now-defunct Pennsylvania Railroad.
The area is now part of Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware counties. Many towns in the area still bear Welsh names. Some, such as Bala Cynwyd, Radnor and Haverford Township, are named after places in Wales. Others, such as Tredyffrin or Uwchlan, have independent Welsh names. Some communities in the area that formerly comprised the Welsh Tract were subsequently given Welsh names. Among these were Gladwyne, formerly "Merion Square" (which was given its new name in 1891 in order to imitate the stylish Welsh names of adjoining towns, although the name is meaningless in Welsh), and Bryn Mawr, formerly "Humphreysville" (which was renamed in 1869). An additional Welsh settlement included Bala Cynwyd which originated as two separate towns that have grown together.
A more successful attempt at setting up a Welsh-speaking colony occurred two centuries later, in the Chubut Valley of Patagonia.

Unfortunately, the Cymry-fication of the Main Line was, for the most part, a public relations ploy by the railroad to make the area more 'quaint' and 'historic', rather than an actual naming process. True, there were many Welsh settlers in the area in the 1700s, but the entire 'Welsh Nation' gambit didn't work out like they'd hoped. Only a few of the towns had Welsh names from the beginning, like Malvern and Radnor; the rest were changed, like Athensville to Ardmore, later...

Welsh place names

29 August 2008

Merion

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The Welsh were added later

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