CAT HOWELL

Family Ties: Storytelling of an American Heritage Family

Chapter Three 

Samuel Howell Jnr 1755-1806

Part I

The Howell’s, Evans’ and Jones, and Vernon Families 

Quakers traveling to the New World

Samuel Howell was the great grandson of Welsh emigrants to the Pennsylvania colony in America, and he with his brothers and cousins came of age in a time of revolution, growing up in the years of discontent and dispute with Great Britain and the Crown over taxes and representation, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Philadelphia was a center of activity and although they were raised in a Quaker community with a peaceful ideology, were all to have their part in the actions that led to the creation of the United States of America.

Samuel’s maternal great grandmother Hannah Price was born in North Wales, in the county of Merionethshire, raised with her brothers and sister in a small community just outside the town of Bala. She was born into an era of great change after the English Civil War and the separation by many from the English Anglican Church. John ap John became the main spokesman at the centre of the Quaker group in North Wales, and would have been known to Hannah’s family who were also devotees of the Quaker movement.

The tensions that Hannah and her family will have experienced as Quakers under the Clarendon Code, and laws such as the 1662 Quaker Act and the 1664 Conventicle Act’ which were designed to cripple the power of the ‘nonconformists’ and ‘dissenters’, would have been unbearable, they were persecuted in their home land for their religious principles and by these acts of Parliament their public worship was forbidden on penalty of fines and imprisonment.

As a result, when Hannah was in her 20s in the early 1680s, many Quakers chose to leave Wales and start a new life in America. As with the Howell, Vernon and Evans families, they planned to join William Penn who was then trying to create an ‘ideal society’ in what became Pennsylvania. 

In 1681 a committee of prominent Welsh Quakers visited William Penn in London to enter into negotiations with him for the purchase of a large tract of land in Pennsylvania. The committee representing the Monthly Meetings of six Welsh shires, included Dr. Edward Jones, from Bala Merionethshire, fellow Quaker and Friend of the Price and Jones family.  The committee reached an agreement with Penn and welcomed the opportunity to seek asylum in Penn’s province, his being a Quaker himself and of Welsh ancestry strengthened their resolve to emigrate to his colony. At the meeting there was every assurance of religious liberty as well as an assurance of economic opportunity, by purchasing a large tract of land and settling there in a body that they could maintain as a community of their own, in the New World.

So in 1682 Hannah and her husband Rees Jones and their three young children, including Lowry who would become Samuel’s grandmother, joined a group of 17 families including Hannah’s brother and sister,  led by Dr. Edward Jones all from Merionethshire sailed on the Lyon from Liverpool. How arduous the voyage would have been is hard to imagine, it will have taken many weeks on perilous seas with their worldly possessions and their beautiful young children. There were twenty eight in all in their group, ten of the children were under six years old and sadly two of them passed away on the passage.

They arrived in Pennsylvania on August 13th and were to be the first Welsh immigrants to settle from the County of Merionethshire in the North of Wales. In a letter from Dr. Edward Jones to John ap Thomas, Dr. Jones described their 5,000 acre purchase from Penn in these words. “I hope it will please thee, and the rest who are concerned, for it hath most rare timber. I have not seen the like in all these parts, there is water enough besides. The end of each lot will be on a river, as large or larger than the Dye at Bala, it is called Skool Kill River.”

Hannah and Rees Jones and their fellow travellers settled in an area known as the ‘Welsh Tract’, land which was to the west and south of Philadelphia, which became the County of Chester, and as they settled many of the townships were named for places that they had left behind in Wales. Their area would be called Lower Merion.

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Meanwhile on August 14, 1682, the the day after Hannah and her group arrived, Samuel’s great grandfather on his father’s side, Randal Vernon, docked in Pennsylvania having sailed on the Friendship, again from Liverpool.  Randal was from Sandyway, Cheshire, in north west of England, and he was a Quaker and a Weaver by trade. He travelled to America with his wife Sarah and their four children, and his two brothers and their families. He and his brothers purchased 625 acres each from William Penn at the price of 12 pounds ten shillings, in a township called Nether Providence nestled between two small rivers and the Welsh tract to the west and the Delaware River to the east of them, in the County of Chester. He became a man of eminence in the colony, and an active and influential member of the Society of Friends. He was instrumental in starting up the Chester Monthly Meetings, and in 1687 he served as a member of the Provincial Assembly, 

Sarah their daughter named after her mother was a young child when they sailed to the New World, and it would be some twenty five or so years later that she would marry Samuel’s grandfather Jacob Howell at the Chester Meeting House on August 19th, 1709. 

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John Howell and his family arrived in Philadelphia in 1697. Little is known about John Howell, Samuel’s paternal great grandfather, except that he was a widower and he sailed from Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire with his three children, Evan, Sarah, and their older brother Jacob, who was ten years old. They settled in the center of Philadelphia, where John was a member of the Society of Friends. He is said to have been a mason but that is all that seems to be known of this man, except that he died in 1721 and was buried in the Friends Burial Ground at 4th and Arch Streets in the city. 

When they arrived John arranged for his eldest son Jacob, to be apprenticed to a tanner in the Northern Liberties.  This area was a more rural landscape north of the city and was an ideal setting for those processes and businesses less desirable for the more urban city setting where they lived. Here were tanneries such as the one where Jacob learned his trade, and clay pits, dye works, and brickyards, and the like. 

After ten years in his apprenticeship, in 1707 at the age of twenty, Jacob obtained a Certificate of Removal from the Philadelphia Society of Friends  and moved south to Chester County where he purchased a plot of land and there built a three-story brick house, the first in the area. He also erected a tannery of his own which he operated for over 50 years. He joined the Chester Society of Friends with his certificate from the Philadelphia Friends, and it was there that he met the Vernon family and soon married Sarah, Randal’s daughter.

Together they had a large family, eleven children in all, including two pairs of twins. Their first two children Benjamin and Hannah died young, and then there was John, Jacob, Sarah, and twins Joseph and Samuel – our Samuel’s father – and then Isaac, and Joshua. then came Mary and Martha who were twins but sadly they too died young.

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The Evans’ family arrived in the year following Jacob Howell with his father John. Thomas Evans Samuel’s maternal great grandfather sailed from Liverpool in 1698, they were a group of Quaker’s from the Afon Trywern Valley just a few miles north of Bala. With him were his three brothers, their wives and children and his sister and her husband and their children. They had purchased in March of 1698 land as a group in the township they were to call Gwynedd, west of the city of Philadelphia. Thomas was from Fron-goch which was three miles out of Bala to the north and they were members of Pennllyn Meeting in Bala town. 

On the 18th of April they sailed from Liverpool, their ship was the ‘Robert and Elizabeth’, its master was Ralph Williams, and its owner Robert Haydock, of Liverpool. The ship touched at Dublin, before proceeding on their voyage, and it was not until the 1st of May, that they finally spread the ship’s sails for the New World. It will have been a very arduous voyage and forty-five of the passengers  – a very large part of the whole number – and three of the sailors, died of dysentery. It was not until the 17th of July, eleven weeks to a day after they had left Dublin, and fifteen after starting from their homes in Wales, that they reached port in Philadelphia, and set foot in the land that was to be their new home. 

There was work to be done in setting up their community. The women and children found homes for several weeks in Philadelphia or at Lower Merion, with their Friends who had already settled there, while the men prepared shelter, and laid in food for the winter. Thomas Evans and his friend William John had procured indian corn to be planted, supplies of food were secured from the settlers in adjoining townships while berries and nuts were gathered over the summer months, they finally moved into their homes in the November before the winter would to set in. 

That they knew the earlier group who had arrived in 1682 and settled in Merion was for sure, they were all from the same area of Bala and had heard from them over the years, the earlier settlers sending back good reports of the land and its freedoms, news that they as Quakers in an oppressed country had yearned for. Thomas’s oldest son Hugh was sixteen when they arrived in Philadelphia in 1698, he was Samuel’s maternal grandfather and his famiiy’s history in Bala and knowledge of the Price and Jones family from there too, made it inevitable that he and Lowry Jones would know of each other. In the years since they arrived they had both married but had both been widowed, so in 1717 they were married in Chester and together they had three daughters, the first being Anne Evans, who in 1745 married Samuel Howell the elder, son of Jacob Howell and Sarah Vernon. Anne and Samuel were father and mother of our Samuel Howell, the third born of their five children together .

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Our Samuel, Samuel Howell Junior was born in 1755, and so although he wouldn’t have known his great grandparents who travelled from Wales and England to set up the first communities in  Pennsylvania, their stories will have been passed down by his grandparents who had all arrived as children in the new country with their own memories of the Welsh and English homeland and the extraordinary voyage across the Atlantic with their parents to settle in the New World.