Cornish Emigrants in America

Although it is impossible to assess the exact numbers of emigrants from Cornwall to the United States in the century before the outbreak of the first World War, it cannot have been far short of a hundred thousand. Some Cornish people had gone to the New World before the American Revolution, but group and family rather than individual migrations began in the period of economic dislocation following the close of the Napoleonic wars, or, more specifically after a financial and economic speculative boom collapsed with particularly devastating effects in some West Cornish mining districts in 1825. It may be postulated that this was the first major slump in peace-time to afflict the mining industry which had come to be regarded as the mainstay of Cornish economic life; earlier recessions and disturbances could easily be associated, rightly or wrongly, with the wars against the French which had raged more than half the years of the long reign of George III. In the course of the next century there were to be more depressions culminating in that which, after the first World War, led to almost the complete cessation of mining activities in Cornwall

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