excerpts from PENRYN, A Village Locked in time
by Leonard M. Davis
published by Friends of the Griffith Quarry - 1995
Penryn or Penrhyn? Completion of a working quarry near the newly completed railroad siding would inevitably lead to the development of a town there. No ordinary name must be given this new quarry town, and the man with the "double barreled" name was more than equal to the christening in his diary: "Concluded last night with Judge Crocker to call this Quarry PENRYN."
Some sources are of the opinion that the original spelling of the village was "Penrhyn" after the famed Penrhyn slate quarries in Griffith Griffith’s native Wales. Other maintain it was named after the landmark Penrhyn Castle. Both state that the original spelling of the new town as Penrhyn and that it was later changed for ease of spelling and pronunciation . We disagree with this assumption. Griffith’s entry of May 18, 1865, emphatically states that from the onset the name of the new town would be Penryn. . . .Several years later, when a Masonic Lodge was established at the quarry town, it took the original Welsh Spelling which it maintains to this very day.