Welch-McIntosh House
(ca. 1907)
Truck farmer George Welch and his family resided in the Queen Anne style Welch-McIntosh House for nearly a century.
3301 Gibbon Rd, Charlotte, NC 28269
The Welch-McIntosh House, originally the home of George Stewart Welch (1867-1935) and his wife Clara Lee Rumple Welch (1868-1953), is the best-preserved example of a transitional Queen Anne style cottage in the Derita community. Married in 1894, the Welchs previously rented a house in that community before deciding to build a residence in which to raise their seven children.
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George Welch was a resourceful and imaginative truck farmer. In addition to raising crops, he was a dairyman and tended peach, apple, and pear orchards. He regularly delivered milk, butter, fruits, and vegetables to his Charlotte customers, including the Berryhill Store in Fourth Ward. In 1911, George established the North Derita Poplar Springs, located at the bottom of the hill behind the Welch home, to produce and deliver pure drinking water. The spring house (no longer extant) was also used to refrigerate milk produced by Welch’s cows. Keenly interested in community affairs, George served as the School Committee Chairman of the Derita School for many years.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Derita community grew up along the tracks of the Atlantic, Tennessee, & Ohio Railroad that extended from Charlotte to just beyond Mooresville, North Carolina. Now almost totally engulfed by Charlotte's suburban sprawl, Derita was once a distinct trading center for farmers in the region. The community’s centerpiece was the commercial district about one-half mile east of the Welch-McIntosh House. Located on Gibbon Road, the house parallels the railroad tracks and stands on what, even in 1907, was a well-traveled road from the outside world.
George died in the Welch home in 1935. Clara Welch continued to live in the house until her death in 1953. Both are buried in the Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church cemetery. In 1936, George and Clara’s daughter Ruby Welch married Fred Campbell McIntosh, a native of Sanford, North Carolina. The couple moved into the Welch-McIntosh House with Clara one year later. Fred McIntosh was a marble and tile setter employed by the Renfrow Tile and Marble Company in Charlotte. Ruby worked outside the home as a nurse after the couple’s two sons started school in the mid-1940s. She raised the children in the Welch-McIntosh House after Fred’s death in 1953 and lived in the house until 1995. Ruby donated the Welch-McIntosh House to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Preservation Foundation in 1996 so that the house might be restored and preserved.