Coedpoeth (North Wales)
Coedpoeth is an odd name for a village: “coed poeth” means “hot trees”. It was the centre from which the Wesleyan movement spread in north Wales, and eventually was well supplied with Methodism in both English and Welsh. There were Wesleyan, Calvinistic, and Independent chapels, and down a footpath between Smelt Road and Old Smelt Road a now-vanished Primitive chapel marked as such on old OS maps. Apart from a mention of it in the obituary of a local Methodist who was converted there, I have (as yet at least) found no further information. Maybe someone else can supply more details?
The 1922 District Synod Handbook has the following information.
Coedpoeth chapel was built in 1861 at a cost of £110. In its early days the society was strong and vigorous, but the village was essentially Welsh, and after the lead mines closed many of the English-speaking people left, “and the faithful few have a hard task before them” (1922).
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I was talking yesterday (13 March 2016) with an elderly inhabitant of Coedpoeth, who remembers that Roman Catholic children from Liverpool were evacuated to Coedpoeth in the Second World War and were taken to the chapel that used to be Primitive Methodist. This, coupled with its absence from the 1940 Statistical Returns of Methodist chapels, points to an earlier acquisition by the Roman Catholics than the 1950s.
The chapel in Coedpoeth is not listed in “Methodist Church Buildings, Statistical Returns for July 1st 1940” (published 1947), so if my informant in the village is correct, it must presumably either have passed into the hands of the Roman Catholics before the 1950s, or been put to some other use (or simply unused) before they acquired it.
There is an amateur local historian of Wesleyan Methodism living in Minera (which adjoins Coedpoeth) who has a photograph of every chapel that has existed in the village and area except the Primitive Methodist. However, he tells me that it was transferred to the Roman Catholics in the 1950s before they built their new church on a different site in the village. Maybe an approach to local Roman Catholics, or a search of their archives, might bring a photograph to light. I shall make the attempt.
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