Welsh Journals

Capel y Cymer: Llanw a Thrai E.D. Lewis and I. G. Jones* Capel y Cymer, Porth, was the first meeting-house to be opened in the Rhondda Valleys and its history provides the continuous thread of human experience that binds the momentous and turbulent history of that heavily industrialised region to the rural solitudes of its innocent past. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the factors, economic and social as well as religious, which help to account for the origin, the meteoric growth and the even more dramatic decline of the Independent cause at Cymer. The beginnings of nonconformity in Blaenau Morgannwg are indissolubly linked with the name of Henry Davies (?1696-1766) of Blaengwrach in the Neath Valley [1]. Henry Davies, according to the historian of eighteenth-century dissent, was a Carmarthenshire man, of a well-to-do family, who received his early education in the Academy at Carmarthen under its founder, William Evans[2]. In 1718, at the age of twenty-two, he was ordained minister of the new church at Blaengwrach on the occasion of its separation from the mother-church of the region, and he kept a school there. By 1734 there were sixty-three members at Blaengwrach (34 men and 29 women) drawn from the widely scattered communities of the Upper Swansea Valley, Cwmdulais and Glyncorrwg as well as the Upper Neath Valley itself[3]. But his real fame rests on his ardent and tireless evangelical zeal in spreading the Gospel in the Blaenau and *This article has been prepared from the surviving draft, sketches and notes of a commemorative history of the chapel upon which Dr E.D. Lewis was engaged at the time of his death. It is therefore a work of reconstruction in which I have endeavoured to incorporate as much as possible of Dr Lewis's pioneering work. I.G.J.