Williams family of Caerhays, Burncoose and Scorrier
family
The Williams family of Caerhays, Burncoose and Scorrier were owners of mines and smelting works for several generations during the Cornish Industrial Revolution. A branch of the family settled in Port Hope, Ontario.
The family developed williamsii hybrid camellias and fine gardens at Burncoose, Gwennap; St Michael Caerhays and Scorrier House, all in Cornwall, United Kingdom.
Family members
John Williams the First (1685–1761) purchased Burncoose in 1715, married Thomasine Paynter.
John Williams the Second (1714–1790) initiated the construction of the Great County Adit, which eventually became a 40-mile system of adits, draining over 60 mines.
Michael Williams (1730–1775), son of John the First married Susanna, daughter of Henry Harris of Cusgarne, Cornwall, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of William Beauchamp (1670–1729) of Pengreep, Cornwall. He lived at Burncoose and was the father of,
John Williams the Third (23 September 1753 – 17 April 1841), son of Michael Williams (1730–1775), controlled the Gwennap copperbelt and copper smelting works in Swansea. Also owned tin-smelting works, sulphur mines and quarries. He was a Director of The Cornish Bank. With the Fox family of Falmouth, built the Plymouth breakwater and developed the harbour at Portreath and linked it by the Portreath tramway to his mine at Poldice.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8021118. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1685, 1761, 1715 and 1714.
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This entry incorporates text from “Williams family of Caerhays, Burncoose and Scorrier” 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.