Rev. Harry C. Welp

Harry C. Welp was born on 12 August 1897 in Frohna, Perry County, Missouri, the son of Henry J. Welp and Regina Twenhafel. Frohna was a close-knit German Lutheran settlement in the Missouri Ozarks, and faith in the Welp household was not merely observed but practiced professionally — Harry's father was the teacher and principal of the Christian Day School at Trinity Lutheran Church, where all the school-age children of the community were enrolled. At the age of six Harry took his seat in his father's two-room schoolhouse, and eight years later he graduated from it.

The ministry had been his aim from boyhood. "My desire was, with the help of God, to prepare myself for the Holy Ministry," he wrote late in life. In the fall of 1911, at the age of fourteen, he left Frohna for St. Paul's College in Concordia, Missouri. His parents would wait ten years from that day for the morning they watched him ordained.

Harry graduated from St. Paul's College in 1917 and enrolled at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis — an institution of nearly 600 students taught by eleven professors. His graduating class numbered 84.

His vicarage year, served in 1919 and 1920, placed him at St. John Lutheran Church in Baldwin, Illinois. His duties were broad: teaching the Christian Day School through all eight grades, leading youth work, assisting the pastor with preaching, and performing other pastoral duties as needed. Each summer during his seminary years he traveled to Indianapolis to work — the first summer at the Stutz Automobile Factory, which built one car per week; the following summer at the Pres-O-Lite Company. It was in Indianapolis, in the summer of 1919, that he met the woman who would become his wife.

Alma Rafert was working at Kingans in Indianapolis when she and Harry first crossed paths in the summer of 1919. The timing left precious little room for courtship.

Harry returned the following summer of 1920, working at Pres-O-Lite. The letters continued through his final year at the seminary. Alma attended his Baccalaureate Service in St. Louis at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, and traveled with him afterward to Frohna to meet his parents. When he was ordained at Campbell Hill on 26 June 1921, she was not present — she could not get the time from work, nor did she have money for the journey. She had planned to work a full year longer. But once Harry was settled in Campbell Hill, he wanted her sooner. And so in October, as she put it simply, they had a very simple wedding.

After graduating from Concordia Seminary in 1921, Harry accepted a call to St. Peter Lutheran Church at Campbell Hill, Illinois. The town's population stood at about 250. There was no electric power line, no improved road leading into it. Four members of the congregation owned an automobile. Four churches served the community: one Southern Baptist, one Presbyterian, and two Lutheran — one LCMS, one LCA. Most people who required a hospital had to travel roughly 100 miles to St. Louis.

The congregation of about 120 souls was predominantly German-speaking. But the years since 1917, when America had entered the war against Germany, had left deep wounds. Harry described what his predecessors had faced:

On 26 June 1921, Harry was ordained and installed as pastor of St. Peter Lutheran Church by Rev. J. Lohrman of Baldwin, Illinois. Pastor Haertling of Christ Lutheran Church in Jacob, Illinois assisted. Harry's parents and his sister Theresia came from Frohna for the service — they had waited ten years. The service was well attended. That same day he performed his first baptism as pastor. The following Sunday he preached his first sermon, and that same afternoon conducted his first funeral.

On Labor Day 1921, the Christian Day School — closed for several years as a casualty of the wartime antipathy toward German-language institutions — was reopened. Enrollment stood at 18 pupils across all eight grades. The pastor was their sole teacher.

Seven children were born to Harry and Alma in the parsonage at Campbell Hill across the years that followed. Two did not survive childhood, and the weight of those losses ran through the family's life like a current beneath everything else. Alma wrote of each child in turn, in her own hand:

When Harry reopened the Christian Day School on Labor Day 1921, he was doing more than filling empty desks. The school had been closed as a direct casualty of the wartime antipathy toward German-speaking communities, and its reopening was an act of congregational healing as much as education. All eight grades, one teacher, 18 pupils.

By 1937 enrollment had grown to 59 students — during the depths of the Great Depression, when the Synod was carrying more than 100 ordained candidates who had no congregation to call them. When St. Peter's enrollment exceeded 50, the congregation decided to engage one of these men:

The school photographs from 1937 and 1938 in the photograph collection show the congregation's children in those years — Vera and Doris Welp appear in both. In 1941 Harry confirmed his own daughter Doris and her classmates, a moment preserved in the confirmation photograph from that year.

At 2:58 in the afternoon on Wednesday, 13 November 1951, a tornado swept out of the northwest and cut through the heart of Campbell Hill. It lasted three minutes. In that time it carved a path a mile long and 600 feet wide through a town whose entire population was 336 people. Fifteen homes were flattened, eight businesses damaged, two automobiles crushed. Approximately 150 residents were left homeless. Seven were hospitalized. Damage was estimated at $200,000.

The Du Quoin Evening Call reported the scene the following morning. National Guardsmen from Murphysboro arrived before nightfall to patrol the streets. A Salvation Army field kitchen set up at the intersection of Main Street and Route 43 handed out food to refugees and rescue workers. The American Red Cross sent 150 cots to the school gymnasium for the fifty or sixty displaced families. The town had no electricity and most of its telephone service was gone.

Pastor Welp went out into the wreckage as soon as the storm had passed. He came upon a woman who was trapped in her basement, unable to get out. He stayed with her, talking with her, keeping her calm, until rescuers arrived to free her. The names most associated with basement rescues in the newspaper account are those of families already known to him from the congregation and the school: the Misselhorns, the Ratherts, the Alms family. Martin Alms, 78, and his wife Lula were among the injured that day.

It was not the kind of pastoral act that makes a church record. But in a town of 336 people, where Harry Welp had baptized the children, confirmed the teenagers, married the young couples, and buried the old, there was no one better suited to sit near the ruined building and wait with someone who was frightened.

During World War II, the United States military established a network of prisoner of war camps across Illinois to house the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers captured in North Africa and Europe. One of these, Camp Pomona (an old CCC camp) was located in the southern part of Jackson county, operating as a branch camp under Camp Ellis near Peoria. The camp was only open for one season in 1945, the prisoners working on nearby farms.

The United States Army, operating under the Geneva Convention, was required to provide for the religious needs of prisoners of war. For the German Lutherans at Camp Pomona, the solution was near at hand: the government asked Harry Welp, the pastor at Campbell Hill, a fluent German speaker raised in a German Lutheran household, to preach for the prisoners.

The assignment carried a particular weight of history. Harry had watched his own congregation be torn apart during World War I by the hatred directed at German speaking communities, his predecessor threatened with tar and feather, the German language outlawed from the very church Harry now served. A generation later, he was standing before young German soldiers in a prison camp in his own county, preaching to them in the language of his childhood. Whatever those services meant to the men in that camp, they were also, in some sense, a closing of a circle that the first war had broken open.