Seventeen children in one house sounds like a movie plot but for the Welchert siblings, it was simply known as “childhood.”
“For us it was normal,” Jeanne Knight, the 12th of 17 children said of growing up in the rural Fort Calhoun home. “We didn't know any different.”
After serving as a home for nearly 20 people, the house on County Road P41 began its new life Wednesday. Gene Dunn, long-time neighbor to the Welcherts, moved the house from the Welchert property to his own. Dunn said he wanted the house on his property to serve as a guest home but to also keep the setting for memories of so many intact.
“I never thought that the Welchert house would be available and I figured someone would use it on the property it was on,” Dunn said, explaining that the new owner of the property could not keep the house. Dunn offered to take it off the land, which was readily accepted. “When they were going to tear it down, I wanted to save it for the historical aspect of both the family and the farm house.”
Over the last month, Dunn has readied the house for the move across the street, reinforcing the walls and the floor joists and setting the house on wheels. It now sits on its new home as a reminder of a family known throughout Fort Calhoun.
Growing up
Knight has fond memories of life in the roughly 1,000-square foot home. She didn't see growing up in a crowded house as an inconvenience, but rather one that came with built-in friends.
“We didn't have a lot of downtime but when we did, we could have our own baseball team,” she said, with a laugh.
Upstairs at the home, two 9x10 bedrooms kept 12 boys and another off the kitchen is where Jeanne and her sisters slept. The rooms weren't spacious by any means, but they were serviceable for their needs.
“Back in those days, you didn't have a lot of clothes,” Knight said. “You had a set of work clothes and a set of nice clothes.
“It was probably two beds, a dresser and a little closet.”
But with cramped bedrooms, before the advent of air conditioning, sleep sometimes had to be done creatively.
“A lot of times in the summer, the bedrooms got so hot,” Willie Welchert, the oldest of 17, said. “We didn't have any air conditioning and we had one fan downstairs.
“We'd take a blanket and go out and lay outside. It was cooler outside than it was inside, but we never gave it a thought.”
And trying to use the lone bathroom was another part of life that became commonplace to the Welchert siblings.
“Looking back now, I think, 'How did we live in there, with the whole one bathroom for all those years?'” Knight said, laughing.
Welchert chuckles when he thinks of dinner time at home and passes a brief word of sympathy to his mother, who served as the main cook for the household.
“The amount of food mom would cook just to feed the numbers of us is unbelievable,” he said. “At the peak, she was baking 48 loaves of bread a week.”
A built-in workforce
Most of the day for the Welchert children was spent tending to the large family garden.
Willie Welchert said at its peak in 1970, the family gardened 130 acres of vegetables and each kid living at the home at that time was expected to help.
“We didn't have chemicals, it was all done by hand,” he said. “Our weed control was just done with a hoe.”
Welchert said planting would start in March with onions, with lettuce in April. For an idea of how large the plot was, Welchert said his dad would plant 200 pounds of radishes and 22 acres of asparagus.
Duties started early on in childhood, Knight said, but helped the siblings learn how to work with one another both on the farm and well afterwards.
“We worked a lot from the time we were five years old,” she said. “We helped out in the barn, started out in the field carrying baskets and picked weeds.
“That's why we all work so well now. We grew up working together and all got along.”
It was that hard work and emphasis on togetherness, Willie said, that led to a family with a reputation for respect throughout the community.
“I can say my mom was very proud of her family,” he said. “She had 15 boys and not a single one was in trouble with the law.
“We had no life as kids but in the long run, I think back, and they did as good as they could with that many mouths to feed.”
The house's new home
When Knight heard of Dunn's plan to move the house, she was appreciative someone took the initiative to save the historic home. His gesture, she said, made her realize that the house was special to more than just the 20 who called it home at one point.
“It blows me away it meant that much to him,” she said. “His family had a farm next to ours when we were younger and it surprised me he had that much interest in it.
“I don't like anything being torn down if you don't have to.”
Dunn said preserving the house was a no-brainer. While he plans to renovate it for a guest home, he wants it to continue to stand as a relic of days past.
“It's the connection to everything that's going on now in life with all these old things being torn down and there's not a lot of saving of these old farms and farm houses,” he said.
Welchert, too, is appreciative of the effort. He said the home will continue to serve as a reminder of the place where they learned to live and work and the place where they gained lessons they still use today.
“Let's put it this way, for as big of a family we are, we're still a really close family,” he said. “We all grew up working and still, to this day, my brothers and sisters are working all the time.
“It was a good way to grow up.”
