Cornish Emigrants and America

Abstract

Among the immigrant groups which made a considerable contribution to the development of the United States and of the American way of life the Cornish people must be reckoned. Older accounts of the mining, camps of the Pacific Coast actually enumerate the “Cornish nationality” among the races that thronged to the gold and silver diggings. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, British, census returns reveal that there were rarely more than a third of a million Cornish folk in the “old country”, and after 1861 their numbers declined. Yet this people impressed themselves upon the American scene, even on some of its most superficial observers, and this for a variety of reasons, apart from the local provincialisms created by geographic remoteness and physical difficulties of communication in the homeland until well into the “railway age”.