The historical marker reads:
The Mynde Wall
Chartist Uprising
In the last quarter of the twentieth century we have taken the Right to Vote for granted. This was not always so, and in 1839 after the failure of petitioning the Government of the day, the men of Britain and South Wales sought to change the system through marches and demonstration - this was known as The Chartist Uprising. John Jenkins the owner of the Mynde House and Master of the Ponthir Tin Plate Works, concerned for his property, constructed the Mynde Wall in order to keep the marauding demonstrators out. The wall in front of you is what remains of his efforts.
This plaque references the Newport Rising of 1839 in which John Frost of Newport was a prominent figure in the Chartist movement. John Jenkins, who was the owner of Mynde House, as well as the owner of Ponthir Tin Plate works, built the wall to keep demonstrators out.
The following additional information about the Chartist Uprising is from Wikipedia:
"Several outbreaks of violence ensued, leading to several arrests and trials. One of the leaders of the movement, John Frost, on trial for treason, claimed in his defence that he had toured his territory of industrial Wales urging people not to break the law, although he was himself guilty of using language that some might interpret as being a call to arms. Frost's attitudes and stance, often seen as ambivalent, after setbacks and violence including loss of life, led another Chartist to describe Frost as putting 'a sword in my hand and a rope around my neck'. Nevertheless, Frost had placed himself in the vanguard of the Chartist movement by 1839. With the Charter petition rejected by Parliament and another prominent Chartist, Henry Vincent, arrested in the summer of 1839 for making inflammatory speeches, the physical force Chartists started organising. As summer turned to autumn the political movement became a front for a military organisation - drilling, arming, training. Secret cells were set up, covert meetings were held in the Chartist Caves at Llangynidyr and weapons were manufactured as the Chartists armed themselves. Behind closed doors and in pub back rooms plans were drawn up for a mass protest.
On November 4th 1839 Frost led a several thousand marchers through South Wales to the Westgate Hotel, Newport, Monmouthshire where there was a confrontation. Some have suggested that the roots of this confrontation lay in Frost's frequent personal conflicts with various influential members of the local establishment; others, that Chartist leaders were expecting the Chartists to seize the town, preventing the mail reaching London and triggering a national uprising: Frost and other Chartist leaders did not agree on the course of action adopted.
The result of the Newport Rising was a disaster for Chartism. The hotel was occupied not only by the representatives of the town's merchant classes and the local squirearchy, but by sixty or more armed soldiers. A brief, violent, and bloody battle ensued. Shots were fired by both sides, although most contemporaries agree that the soldiers holding the building had vastly superior firepower. The Chartists did manage to enter the building temporarily, but were forced to retreat in disarray: twenty were killed, another fifty wounded.
Testimonies exist from contemporaries, such as the Yorkshire Chartist Ben Wilson, that Newport was to have been the signal for a national uprising if successful. Older histories suggested that Chartism slipped into a period of internal division after Newport. In fact the movement was remarkably buoyant (and remained so until late 1842). Initially, while the majority of Chartists, under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor, concentrated on petitioning for Frost, Williams and Jones to be pardoned, significant minorities in Sheffield, East London and Bradford planned their own risings in response. Samuel Holberry led an aborted rising in Sheffield on 12 January; police action thwarted a major disturbance in the East End of London on the 14th, and on 26 January a few hundred Bradford Chartists staged a rising in the hope of precipitating a domino effect across the country."