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David Hungate
Gus Welch Trophy
At Randolph Macon, teams under Gus Welch became among the first to travel to games by bus.
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Welch Postcard
Postcard of Camp Kewanzee, c. 1940s.
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Bob Humphreys on Gus Welch
What kind of coach was Gus Welch, who spent most of his adult life mentoring young athletes?
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David Hungate
Gus Welch Trophy
At Randolph Macon, teams under Gus Welch became among the first to travel to games by bus.
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Gus Welch, Animals
In addition to hosting about 50 boys and girls each summer at Camp Kewanzee, Gus Welch kept horses, cows and dogs.
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Gus Welch and Roy Rogers
Gus Welch became a bit of a celebrity in later life; here he hams it up with cowboy star Roy Rogers.
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David Hungate
Mahlon Nichols
Mahlon Nichols of the Bedford area owns a treasure trove of Gus Welch memorabilia.
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Camp Kewanzee
A small, unnamed stream today flows into and through the remains of the old pool walls of Camp Kewanzee
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Welch's 1912 Team
The 1912 team that beat Army: Gus Welch is top row, second from left; Jim Thorpe is next to left, then Coach Pop Warner.
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Gus Welch
Welch holds the game ball from a 1913 win at New York’s Polo Grounds.
Perhaps the deep discrimination against Indians in the U.S. in the early 1900s was part of what tempered the steely resolve that fueled Gus Welch's protest when the Virginia highway department in 1939 came after some of the land of his ridge-line Bedford County summer camp.
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Gus Welch promptly sued the State Highway Commission of Virginia in 1939 when they came to take away more than 125 acres of his Bedford County boys camp for a new roadway.
After all, 27 years earlier, he had been the fierce-as-fire quarterback on a college football team that had played, according to The New York Times, “the most perfect brand of football ever seen in America,” as Welch, the legendary Jim Thorpe and their Carlisle Indian School teammates feinted and foxed their way to a 27-6 win over a highly favored, would-be-number-one Army team that featured a backfield of not just Dwight D. Eisenhower but also three other future World War II generals.
Playing with what Coach Pop Warner called “the sweep of a prairie fire,” the Carlisle boys that day in 1912 re-invented football before the eyes of America, as Welch orchestrated a series of stunning fakes and reverses, pitches and passes that advanced the game from its plodding, pounding “three yards and a cloud of dust” past into the future we witness today.
Gus Welch was 19 years old on the day the Indian boys were inspired not only by the innovations of their coach, but also by the memory of an earlier clash between the U.S. Army and American Indians – the fateful battle at Wounded Knee 22 years earlier. With Indian outbreaks still occurring in the West in 1912, this game was only the second allowed between the army men and the tribesmen.
Welch’s path from the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania to a life in Bedford County was emblematic of the rest of his life of determination, accomplishment, discipline and standing up for his rights and heritage. He’d made the U.S. Olympic track team earlier in 1912, but had been unable to compete in Stockholm because of illness. After serving as captain of the Carlisle team in 1913, the 5’9”, 152-pound Welch went on to play professional football with the Canton Bulldogs from 1915 to 1917. He studied law and then served as a Captain under General John J. Pershing during World War I, and after the war began what would become a long and fruitful career as a coach, first at Washington State, where his football teams went 16-10-1 during 1919-1922.
In 1923, he came to Virginia to become the athletic director as well as the coach of the football, baseball, basketball, track, lacrosse and boxing squads at Randolph-Macon College.
And in 1926, he and his bride of three years – Julia Carter Welch – bought about 500 acres of former apple orchard land near the northern end of the Bedford-Botetourt county line and founded Camp Kewanzee, a summer camp for boys and later opened to girls as well.
Meanwhile, Welch’s coaching career continued to advance, including a 1930-’34 stint as lacrosse coach at the University of Virginia.
During these years, the summer camp became more and more popular, a fact that added to Welch’s “gall and dumb amazement” when, in early 1939, the State Highway Commisssion, operating on behalf of the U.S. Department of the Interior, came to claim those 128.27 acres of the Welches’ land, to use them for a planned ridge-line roadway called The Blue Ridge Parkway.
Gus and Julia Welch said hell no, and took the state to court.
Gus and Julia Welch lost, and were paid $3,825.40, which was applied to their original $11,000 debt to R. H. Patterson for the total Camp Kewanzee acreage.
The judge asked Mr. Welch if he had any comment on the final decree.
And Mr. Welch was ready: “The white man has been taking land from the Indian for so long that it has become a habit with him.”
In fact, those Welch traits of dogged adherence to principle and determination in the face of adversity, which had showed up both against Army and against the Commonwealth, had displayed themselves at least several other times over the first 40 years of his life:
• I Within a span of five years during his boyhood and having already lost his father, he lost his mother, three brothers and two sisters to tuberculosis. His reaction, even as a young teen: To dedicate himself to the outdoors and to physical activity. “Now that we’re no longer people of the chase,” he told his football coach at Carlisle, “poor physical condition is the curse of the Indian. A game of some kind is our one chance against tuberculosis.”
• A year after the triumph over Army, Gus Welch led an insurrection against Coach Pop Warner and other school officials. The Carlisle School, established in 1879 as a patriarchal, well-intentioned if steeped-in-racism “answer to the Indian problem,” had long shortcutted its students in its attempt to “civilize” them. By 1913, the combination of poor conditions, food and management as well as allegations of embezzlement saw 276 students, led by student body president Gus Welch, sign a petition that went to the Secretary of the Interior. It both brought significant reform and signaled the beginning of the end for Carlisle, which played its last football game in 1915 and closed in 1918, as it began to occur to people that Indian children should go to school with all the other children.
• In a sad denouement for the Carlisle football program, Warner coaxed Welch back for one last game – in 1914 against vaunted Notre Dame. In a vain attempt to uphold the honor of the Indians, Welch, on defense, attempted to put his 152-pound body in the way of on-charging fullback Ray Eichenlaub, 6’2”, 210. Eichenlaub’s knee met Welch’s face square-on as Welch attemtped the tackle. Despite fractures of the cheek and skull and uncertainty about his life for four days, Welch left the hospital against doctor’s orders and ignoring information that only a period of rest could prevent “a future of invalidism . . . such as paralysis, deafness or loss of sight.”
• Headaches and poverty slowed his path over the ensuing two years, but Welch had nonetheless made his way into law school and played professional football. All before, in April 1917, he enlisted in officer training school. He was commissioned a captain in 1918, but to his dismay, was assigned to Camp Meade, Md. and put in charge of recreation. But Welch, wanting to go to France and fight the war, found a way: He took over the 250-man, all-black 808th Pioneers and went overseas with his raw troops, to carry out the duties no one else wanted.
The 1939-’40 carving away of 128 acres did not end Camp Kewanzee, as its buildings and primary recreation lands lay to the east of the roadway and its right of way. The camp continued to operate, serving up to 50 five-to 14-year-olds each summer through the decade, as Gus Welch continued his athletic mentoring career in the non-summer months, during World War II serving as head of physical fitness at Georgetown University, and then teaching phys-ed at Lyndon Hill Junior High in Prince George County.
But as the decade of the ‘40s wore on, difficulties arose over the care of the camp during the winters. Caretakers came and went, and the Welches – then spending their winters in the Washington, D.C. area – worried increasingly over the stock at the camp. One winter Gus Welch had to leave Washington at 2 a.m. in a snowstorm to take care of the animals, prompting talk of selling the camp.
Instead, the Welches moved to Bedford, into a house along Va. 43 not far down the mountain from the parkway and the camp, and all went well for a year. Then Welch suffered, in quick succession, a detached retina and a subsequent injury to the same eye, and the combination of hospital bills and repairs to the home and the camp left the couple broke, and the camp struggled to meet its obligations. It closed in 1950, but was apparently operated for some years thereafter as a church camp.
Meanwhile, Welch was hired as a coach and teacher at Montvale High School, along U.S. 460 about 16 miles east of Roanoke, in the area of the huge white petroleum tanks on the other side of the road. Sources cite Welch saying those years were his “most rewarding” as a coach.
Among his charges on the diamond was pitcher/third baseman and Covington-native Bob Humphreys, who would go on to have a nine-year career in major league baseball as a pitcher. Humphreys, who lives in Bedford, characterizes Coach Welch as a “laid back kind of guy who let you play.”
Gus and Julia Welch were by this time among the Bedford area’s leading citizens. They lived in that big white house on Va. 43, just down the mountainside from the Blue Ridge Parkway. They were covered from time to time in the Bedford newspaper and in the Roanoke paper.
But the combination of aging and the responsibilities of looking after a troublesome adopted daughter – Serena, a niece of Gus Welch – began to wear on Welch. He continued to act as a sort of American Indian elder statesman, being one of the speakers at the 1962 opening of the National Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and near the end of his life serving as honorary chairman of the effort to establish an American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame, to which he was posthumously elected in 1973.
Gus Welch died in 1970 at age 79 in Bedford County Memorial Hospital. His ashes were scattered at Camp Kewanzee.
Julia Carter Welch continued to live in an apartment in Bedford for several years after her husband’s death, and then spent her waning days at Richfield Retirement Home in Salem before she passed away in 1987, when her ashes too were spread at the camp she and Gus had founded, nurtured, fought for and run for a quarter century.
Friends: Welch and Thorpe
The star quarterback and the star halfback at Carlisle Indian School in the heroic 1912 college football season were also best friends and roommates.
Jim Thorpe, viewed by many as the greatest athlete who ever lived, had some other traits as well: shy, withdrawn, arrogant, stubborn; a young man who felt comfortable on the playing field and nowhere else. His difficult personality may have had much to do with a difficult childhood, during which he was beaten by his father, lost his twin brother at age 12, began running away from home at an even earlier age than that, and was orphaned during his teens. Add to that the overall status of Indians at that time in the U.S. and you have one mean sonovagun.
Gus Welch, four years younger than Thorpe, lost his parents at an even younger age than Thorpe, saw three brothers and two sisters as well as his mother die of tuberculosis, and also experienced the harsh discrimination of the time. But for whatever reason or trait of personality, he came out of his traumatic childhood with a generally opposite reaction.
Where Thorpe ran away several times from Carlisle, Welch longed to attend and cherished his acceptance. And when they were both students, Welch served as a calming influence on Thorpe. In fact, for the rest of Thorpe’s life, Gus Welch was a friend and a source of occasional financial help.
One highlight of the friendship is Jim Thorpe’s first wedding day, in 1913. The happy, dressed-up wedding party photograph is highlighted by the two men at the center: the muscular Thorpe, standing behind his bride; and to his right, the slight and smiling best-man Welch.
The two men went in different directions after that October day in 1912 when they beat Army and changed football forever. Jim Thorpe headed off on a round-the-world tour with the New York baseball Giants as an initial chapter in an adult life that would see him seek to earn a living through his one-of-a-kind athleticism, not only in baseball, but also football, basketball, exhibitions and – especially later in life – stunt work. Gus Welch played one more year at Carlisle, then briefly for the professional Canton Bulldogs before studying law at Dickenson College in 1917 and then enlisting in the army as World War I began.
The trajectories of the two lives might have been predicted by their Carlisle years: the steady quarterback who went on to a lifetime of coaching and mentoring, and the uncontainable halfback whose three marriages and overall pattern of tumultuous instability reflected, in some sad way, his reckless abandon on the football field.
Camp Kewanzee: What’s There Today?
Stop at pretty Sunset Fields overlook at Blue Ridge Parkway milepost 78.4 (a little more than 5 miles north of the Peaks of Otter), and across the parkway, on the east side, there’s a gated, returned-to-forest-floor road sloping down north-north-eastward. The road, on a March, 1940 National Park Service map titled “Sketch of General Layout: Camp Kewanzee and Blue Ridge Parkway,” is labeled as “G.A Welch Access.” It is wide enough, clear and maintained enough that Gus Welch could still make access today, these 70-plus years later.
Zeph Cunningham, NPS park ranger, says the old road is maintained for three reasons.
“The main thing is access in case of fire,” he says. “And part of the Glenwood Horse Trail is back in there. And third, there’s sometimes illegal hunting back in there because of proximity to national forest lands.”
Cunningham, the rare ranger who grew up near the area he serves, says nearly all of the Camp Kewanzee buildings were burned after the camp closed.
Still, a half mile walk in on the good road, you start to see pieces of the past – a ruined cinder block structure here, the fallen remains of a wooden building there. Their locations are in concert with the map, which shows not only roads, but also the trails and buildings of Camp Kewanzee, which Welch and his wife Julia operated from 1926 until 1950.
And downslope a ways along what the map labels as “Abandoned Road,” and that today is a branch-strewn trail, should be “Swimming Pool,” at a point along the unnamed stream that parallels the abandoned road. And sure enough, here are the remains of three rock walls that long ago were sturdy and sound enough to pause the flow of the stream to fill the pool-sized enclosure, so campers staying up on the mountain during the summers of the ‘30s, ‘40s could walk down from the camp buildings for a cool stream-water swim.
Bob Humphreys on Gus Welch
What kind of coach was Gus Welch, who spent most of his adult life mentoring young athletes?
“An easy-going, laid back guy,” says Bob Humphreys, nine-year major league baseball pitcher in the 1960s and a player on the Montvale High baseball teams that Gus Welch coached in the 1950s.
Humphreys, a Covington native who lives in Bedford, says Welch had “more of a phys-ed approach” to coaching.
“He was a football guy, of course,” says Humphreys, a member of the Hampden-Sydney athletic hall of fame for his baseball exploits. “He emphasized conditioning and sportsmanship, and then he pretty much let you play the game. He was a good guy.”