Diolch Linda Garrett for providing us with this name derivation:-


"There is a town in Placer Co. CA called Penryn. A Welsh immigrant by the name of Griffith Griffith established a granite quarry on quarter section of land leased from the Central Pacific Railroad. A siding was completed on February 6, 1865, and the first load of cut stone was shipped less than a week later. The quarry was open for business, but as yet, had no name. The railroad, matter-of-factly, designated the siding “Griffith’s Granite Station,” but Griffith had something else in mind.

Back home in North Wales, G. G., like his father before him, worked in the Penrhyn Slate Quarry. In Welsh, the word penrhyn translates to headland or promontory, which aptly described the seaport from which the Penrhyn Quarry took its name. When it came to naming his new enterprise, the choice was obvious, but not the spelling. To simplify things and avoid the inevitable misspellings that were likely to occur, on the evening of May 17, 1865, Griffith, after discussing the matter with Central Pacific legal counsel Edwin Bryant Crocker (of later art gallery fame), agreed to drop the “h” from the original Welsh spelling and settled on the name, and spelling, we know today. The following day, Griffith recorded this auspicious event in his diary: “Concluded last night with Judge Crocker to call this quarry Penryn.”

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A bit more info. Maybe we could incorporate Welsh connections in each state too? Got a load on the Tafia page at: http://www.chicagotafia.com/welsh-connections-in-the-usa

Griffith Quarry Museum
Corner of Taylor Rd & Rock Springs Road
Penryn, California
Phone: (916) 663-1837
Website: www.placer.ca.gov/Departments/Facility/Museums/LocalMuseums/quarry....
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penryn,_California
The Griffith Quarry Museum was the office of the Penryn Granite Works, which was established by Welsh Immigrant Griffith Griffith in 1864.
We could add the connections either as comments on posts like this one or include an extra field in the spreadsheet for them
Nice... pretty sure my great grand father, Evan Ellis Parry, worked there, in the late 1800's.
.....the one in Wales.

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