Court Square, 1828, Charlottesville, Virginia, from historical marker on Charlottesville City Courthouse wall. Note Maiden Lane in the upper right corner.
William F. Gooch moved from Amherst to Charlottesville, a distance of roughly 50 miles in 1823, two years before the University of Virginia’s first classes met. He married his cousin Mary the next year and had two daughters.
Dr. Gooch practiced medicine in both the town and country for many years and was appointed an Albemarle County magistrate in 1843.1 His town residence was on Maiden Lane which was eventually renamed High Street.
In 1850 his wife and one of his daughters died, and he was listed as one of more than 20 residents at the boarding house run by hotel keeper George W. Turpin.2 (Three years after the census the hotel keeper’s son, George R. Turpin, was shot by John Mosby.) Shortly before the Civil War Dr. Gooch moved to a farm south of Ivy, Virginia, where he died in 1881 in his eighties.3
- Edgar Woods, Albemarle County in Virginia (Bridgewater, Va.: C.J. Carrier Co., [1956?]): 209. [↩]
- Woods, 209; Charles Brown, “Dr. Charles Brown’s Reminiscences of Early Albemarle,” reprinted with an introduction by Mary Rawlings and W. Edwin Hemphill, The Magazine of Albemarle County History 8, (1947-1948): 60; U.S. Census: Albemarle, Virginia, 1850, accessed 23 March 2011; William F. Gooch. Ancestry.com, accessed 6 July 2011. [↩]
- Woods, 209. [↩]
