gether forty or fifty years ago].5 Eleven years earlier, Jonah Evans had been even more emphatic, maintaining that had Hopkin been a young man in 1907, he would almost certainly have become one of Wales's premier musicians. 6
Some measure of Hopkin's local standing can be gained from the fact that his chapel, Carmel, and the locality in general, collected the sizeable sum of £12 8s towards his emigration. As a Gwladgarwr reporter commented, this was pretty good considering times were so hard. Garnant Colliery workmen (suggesting Hopkin worked at that colliery) collected £1 12s and the Gwauncaegurwen fife band, £1 5s. The money was presented at a farewell meeting in Gwauncaegurwen on the evening of 14 October 1879, during which several speeches were interspersed with items by the local glee party. As is unfortunately true of most press reports of farewell meetings for departing emigrants during the nineteenth century, the content of the speeches at this one was not recorded.7 Clearly the departure of Hopkin was a blow to the musical and religious life of the Amman Valley, as contemporaries recognised. Indeed, the loss reminds us of the amount of cultural talent, as well as industrial expertise, that emigration removed from districts all over Wales.8
Even though we are blessed with some biographical information on Hopkin (see Update below), we can only surmise as to why he and his family decided to go Texas at the very time when, as D. W Lewis declared, he was breaking new ground and gaining wider attention.9 The merest glance at both Welsh- and English-language newspapers in Wales during 1879 will reveal that there was much discussion about emigration whilst their pages were heavy with reports of industrial slump, wage reductions, distress and people leaving south Wales for America. 10 No small amount of column space was being devoted to the virtues of Texas as a field of emigration, including the New Cambria settlement near Jacksboro, some sixty miles north-west of Fort Worth, which had been established the previous year. 11 As will be seen later, some from the Amman Valley had already been attracted there. Determining authoritatively why a particular individual or group of people emigrated in the past is a difficult task for the historian because of the lack of surviving evidence. It is possible that the Hopkin family moved for reasons other than the purely economic, and they may well have gone anyway had they not been helped (unfortunately for them, perhaps, as things turned out) by the emigration scheme that became the talk of south Wales - and not always in favourable terms - during 1879. Alternatively, it might be expected that due to the economic circumstances prevailing at the time, they were among a possibly large group of people who wished to emigrate but did not have the means to do so. However, the cost of joining the scheme was quite high. Ultimately, their decision to emigrate must remain an enigma, though it is likely that a desire to return to farming and the prospect of acquiring free and relatively extensive land in what was reputed to be a very rich and fertile agricultural area played no small part in their deliberations.
The scheme in question, officially known as the Texas Freehold Farm and Emigration Company Ltd., was an attempt to alleviate the depressed conditions of the 1870s. 12 One of its key promoters was the renowned Welsh miners' leader, William Abraham, Mabon (18421922), then leader of the Rhondda miners, but who later became a Rhondda MP and President of the South Wales Miners' Federation. Like many others at the time, he was convinced of the efficacy of what appears to us to be the rather shaky and ineffective 'safety-valve' theory of emigration, and believed that out-migration was a means of preventing wage reductions. He wanted to develop an efficient mechanism whereby unwanted workers could be moved from areas where they created a glut, thus creating unemployment and driving down wages, to areas where they were badly needed and where wages were high. Wages in the places they left would