One of the few Civil war veterans attending the 1938 Gettysburg Reunion who had actually fought on that field in July 1863, was William D. Welch, shown here in a well-known Signal Corps photo (No.109174), being embraced by 9 year old “Annie Laurie of Atlanta, Ga.”
Bill Welch was born in Quaker City, Pa. “during Old Hickory's first term.” The exact year is somewhat in dispute. At the 1945 G.A.R. annual reunion, he claimed he was, at 113, the oldest living member – some of his former comrades insisted he was
only 105, and “Capt. Billy” was quite prepared to defend his honor, and his age, with his fists, if need be. His 1865 discharge papers list his age then as 33 -- which would tend to support his claim.
He had enlisted on August 25, 1862, in Co. I, 140th Penn. Volunteer Infantry. Barely six weeks later, at Antietam, he was wounded. He returned to fight at Chancellorsville, and then Gettysburg. As part of Zook's Brigade, Caldwell's Division, of Hancock's II Corps, the 140th Pa. Fought in the Wheatfield on July 2nd (taking heavy casualties), and the next day stood at the “Bloody Angle” to face Picket's oncoming Confederates. Private Welch went on to participate in the Mine Run, Wilderness, and Petersburg campaigns, and on to the war's end. He witnessed Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He mustered out with his regiment at Washington D.C., on May 31, 1865.
After the war, William D. Welch returned to Pennsylvania, and his life as a boatman on the Monongahelia, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers. His occupation was towboating, operating the powerful little tows that pulled strings of rafts or barges, laden with coal, or iron ore, or crockery, or furniture – anything that didn't have to move in a hurry. “I know every lock, dam, shoal and snag between Pittsburgh and New Orleans,” he claimed, “They got pieces of my boats on all of them.” A few weeks before his death, the
Saturday Evening Post published a profile of “Capt. Billy,” entitled “The Old Man and the River” (Sept. 13, 1945). There, Mark Murphy describes the hard life of the riverman:
And young ones there were: 24 children by three wives.
William D Welch died of influenza on December 15, 1945, at the home of his daughter in Eugenia, Ohio. He is buried in Belle Vernon Cemetery, Westmoreland County, Pa. His
Find-a-Grave page contains very little information.
You could write a book about this gentleman.