The South Carolina Welsh settlement consisted of 173,000 acres granted exclusively to Welsh settlers in 1737 by an act of the South Carolina Assembly. Within a decade, nearly all of this land had been taken and settled in by Welsh immigrants, the majority of whom were Baptists. They immigrated to what is now Marlboro County, South Carolina from existing Welsh settlements in Delaware and Pennsylvania as well as directly from Wales. The European settlement along the Peedee River was exclusively Welsh between the 1730s and the 1780s.