Evan Herber Evans (5 July 183630 December 1896), was a Welsh Nonconformist minister. Early life He was the eldest son of Josiah and Sarah Evans of Pant-yr-onen, near Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, where he was born on 5 July 1836. As a boy he witnessed something of the "Rebecca Riots", and went to school at the neighbouring village of Llechryd. He spent several of his earlier years with his grandfather, Jonah Evans, at Pen-yr-Herber, whence, some twenty years later, he adopted his second name. When fourteen years of age, young Evan was apprenticed to a local draper, who was known as a man of literary tastes, and after four years' service in Pontypridd and then at Merthyr, he removed to Liverpool, where in 1857 he commenced to preach in connection with the Welsh congregational church (the Tabernacle), Great Crosshall Street, then under the pastorate of John Thomas (1821–1892). Preacher and lecturer After twelve months' preparatory training at the Normal College, Swansea, he proceeded in September 1858 to the Memorial College, Brecon, where he remained for four years. He was ordained to the pastorate of Libanus Church, Morriston, on 26 June 1862, and almost immediately he stepped into the first rank of the pulpit orators of Wales. After three years at Morriston (during which time a debt of £2,000 was paid off the chapel) he removed in the autumn of 1865 to Carnarvon to undertake the charge of a comparatively weak church, Salem, formed two or three years previously, and still burdened with a heavy debt. Before he left it, in April 1894, it was, in point of members, the largest belonging to the denomination in North Wales, the chapel having been much enlarged in 1890. In 1891-2, he filled the chair of the congregational union of England and Wales, and his first presidential address, on "The Free Churches and their own Opportunities," was described by Dr. Andrw Fairbairn as "magnificent", while his second address, delivered at Bradford, on "A Living Church", was by special vote of the assembly ordered to be printed in a cheap form for general circulation. In 1891, he accepted the appointment as lecturer on homiletics at Bala-Bangor Theological Seminary, and in 1894 became its principal. Civic and literary work Throughout his life, Evans took an active part in civic work; he was elected on the first school board at Carnarvon, and on the first county council. He