Details of Sculptor

Surname

Mainwaring

Alternative Surname

First Name

John I

Initial of Surname

M

Year of Birth/Baptism

1793

Flourished

Year of Death

1876

Biographical Details

He was the nephew of Daniel Mainwaring and was born outside Carmarthen, possibly in Swansea, where he was recorded in a Directory of 1830. He married and baptised his three children, including John Mainwaring II, at St Mary, Swansea. From 1834 to 1839 he was in Edinburgh, employed as superintendent of masonry work on the Edinburgh, New Haven and Leith Railway. He inherited his uncle’s stone and marble business in Carmarthen in 1839 and continued to work from the premises in Spilman Street until March 1841 when he moved to a grander house and premises in Lammas Street. An advertisement of April 1841 in the Carmarthen Journal states that his stock included ‘a great variety of tombs and head stones, of all descriptions’. His monument to Thomas Lewis has a relief of an angel’s head, with leaf decoration (1). After 1841 he became increasingly involved in important building projects in the town. He became a major contractor on the South Wales Railway in 1847, an endeavour that seems to have placed him in acute financial difficulties, for he emigrated to America in the spring of 1849. He became a farmer in Wisconsin and is buried in Indian Creek cemetery, Richland County.
Literary References : Dale-Jones and Lloyd 1989, 54