The Welsh and the Industrialisation of America

THE EARLY development of the US economy is reflected in the life and career of the little-known Welsh American inventor, Oliver Evans. Oliver Evans was born in 1755 to Welsh settlers in Newport in Delaware’s Welsh Tract. Oliver’s father was a shoemaker, one of the many Welsh and Welsh American artisans of the colonial period. Colonial America’s economy was primarily agricultural, and Oliver’s upwardly mobile father purchased a large farm. Oliver and two of his brothers bought part of their father’s Delaware farm in 1782 and opened a mill there in 1785. At this time, grain was ground into flour