Ezekiel Hughes
Welsh settler in America
Ezekiel Hughes (22 August 1766 – 2 September 1849) was one of the earliest Welsh settlers in the Midwestern United States. Hughes, along with Edward Bebb, were the first Welsh settlers in Ohio. Historian Daniel Jenkins Williams said that Hughes and Bebb "were responsible for the first definite step westward on the part of Welsh emigrants."
Biography
Hughes was born on 22 August 1766 in Llanbrynmair, Montgomeryshire, Wales, the son of Richard Hughes. Ezekiel had a small amount of education at Shrewsbury. When he was 20, he was apprenticed to the clockmaker John Tibbott of Newtown, Wales, of the noted Tibbott family. Hughes founded his own clockmaking shop in 1789 at Machynlleth, where he became an acquaintance of the Welsh radical William Jones.
In July 1795, Hughes, his cousin Edward Bebb, George Roberts, and others left Llanbrynmair and walked to Bristol. On 6 August, they set sail for Philadelphia. On the way to America, they ran into problems with press gangs and storms. They made landfall at Philadelphia on 25 October 1795 and stayed the winter.
The public source identifies “Ezekiel Hughes” as welsh settler in America. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ezekiel, Hughes and Welsh.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19040140. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1766, 1849, 1789 and 1795.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ezekiel Hughes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.