Mount Union borough

A Book of Poems, 1909

Before he wrote his history of Mount Union, Charles Howard Welch brought out a book of poems. The title page reads A Book of Poems, by Charles Howard Welch, M.E., A.B., Mount Union, Pa., March 1909. His introduction is dated December 4, 1908. The biography in his later history calls it his first literary production.

The sketch printed in the book says he was born in Germany Valley, Huntingdon County, on November 9, 1880, the only child of Allen Stanley and Annie Kyper Welch, and that the family moved to Mount Union in the spring of 1882. He finished the Mount Union public schools in May 1898, entered Juniata College that autumn, took the Normal Course and graduated in June 1901. The college paper gives his senior thesis as “The Newspaper, Its Growth in the United States,” and says he composed and recited the class poem at the English class day that June.

He went back that fall for the regular college course. The sketch says that at the end of two years he was given the degree of Master in English, after preparing a thesis. In the fall of 1903 the college paper noted that he was doing editorial work on the Mount Union Times, published by his father, and it passed along a Huntingdon newspaper's praise for his lecture on Abraham Lincoln at Mooresville on October 31. At the commencement of June 1905 he gave one of the two orations, “The Balance Wheel,” and the sketch says he took the degree of Bachelor in Arts.

Most of the verses, he wrote, were written for the columns of the Times, of which he was one of the editors. After a hundred or more had been written he collected them, primarily to preserve them and so that his friends could have a copy. He said the lines do not rank with the Masters of poetry, “far from it,” and added, “Perhaps it would be better to say a book of rhymes.” He warned that the political poetry is “strictly partisan,” written “during the seasons of heated campaigns.”

The book is dedicated to Esther Evans Fuller. Find a Grave lists Esther Evans Fuller Welch as his wife, married in 1910, and gives his death as October 7, 1934, at Mount Union. The Library of Congress copy is stamped as a gift from the author, December 12, 1909.

Checked against the record. We read the book page by page in the scanned Library of Congress copy: the title page, dedication, introduction and sketch. We also checked the 1901, 1903 and 1905 volumes of the Juniata Echo, the college paper, and the biography at the front of Welch's history. Still open: the year he received the Master in English. The sketch puts it at the end of two years, about 1903, but we have not seen his name on a list of recipients. The sketch gives June 25, 1905 for his graduation, while the college's printed program puts commencement on June 22, so we say June 1905. The history's biography appears to give 1905 as the book's year, which does not fit the title page or the 1908 introduction, so we follow the book. We did not find the book in the copyright catalogues we searched, and the scans are imperfect. His death date and marriage rest on Find a Grave, and that the dedicatee is the wife it lists is our reading of the matching name and town.

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