The Field Was Ripe...

Seemingly small events often turn out to be large and significant when viewed from the perspective of a few years. This point is well illustrated from a true story which occured in 1832 in and near Merthyr Tydfil, Wales:

"Elder William Henshaw of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints organized the first branch in south Wales at Penydarren, a small village near Merthyr Tydfil in 1843. Henshaw spoke no Welsh and was not fluent in the language. William Henshaw spoke only English. Therefore, membership growth was slow but this growth trend was about to change. In the spring of 1845 Captain Dan Jones, a native Welshman, assumed leadership of the proselyting in Wales. Establishing his headquarters at Merthyr Tydfil, Jones began publishing a newspaper and proselyting tracts in the Welsh language.

Under Jones' leadership, membership in Wales grew rapidly. At the end of 1848 there were 4,645 members in Wales--most of them in the southern region around Merthyr Tydfil. By 1851, there were more than 1,190 active members in the Merthyr Tydfil District alone.

Named for St. Tydfil--a Christian princess slain in the fifth century--the settlement of Merthyr Tydfil dates to Roman times. The town became an early industrial center in the 1750s, with four ironworks in operation by the 1840s. Collieries (a coal mine together with its physical plant and outbuildings) were just then becoming very important to the region's economy in Victorian Britain. Experiencing the explosive growth typical of industrial Britain during the early decades of the 1800s, thousands of families located at Merthyr Tydfil looking for employment in the mines and foundries. During the 1840s, as the Mormon missionaries arrived in Wales, Merthyr Tydfil experienced, as did much of Britain, a serious depression. Such a depression seems to have made many individuals more receptive to new philosophies and religious ideals.

Many of these people, while looking for economic betterment, embraced various nonconformist religious societies. By 1850 the Church of England was a minority Protestant faith in South Wales, as seven out of every ten Protestants belonged to a nonconformist congregation. According to one study, in the early 1850s Mormon membership briefly rivaled the Baptists as one of the leading churches in the region. One historian, Ronald Dennis, described the Merthyr Tydfil of the 1840s as a "radical cultural cauldron". For just over a decade, LDS missionaries prospered in South Wales."