1905 History of Crawford County Kansas

William R. Gooding, a leading farmer and stock-raiser of Crawford township, Crawford county, has lived on his present farm in this county and township for twenty-five years, so that he is one of the old citizens. He has had a most successful career, covering a period of over seventy-five years, and most of it has been devoted to agricultural pursuits. Since coming to Crawford county he has been numbered among its leading citizens, and has been progressive and enterprising both in his own business affairs and in his efforts toward the advancement of public prosperity and welfare.

Mr. Gooding was born in Marion county, Ohio, February 15, 1827, being a son of Sylvester R. and Eliza Gooding, natives, respectively, of Massachusetts and Connecticut. His father died in 1874, when seventy-four years old, and his mother passed away in 1895, at the advanced age of ninety.

Mr. Gooding was educated in the common schools of Ohio, and was reared to the life of the farm and remained at home until he was twenty-one years old. For the following eight years he engaged in buying and shipping cattle for a New York firm, and then rented a farm and began agricultural operations on his own hook. He continued a successful farmer of Ohio until 1879, when he sold his property in Marion county and came to Kansas, where he bought the two hundred and forty acres that make up his present homestead. He put all the improvements on this place, including the house, barn, fences and trees, and has really metamorphosed a prairie tract into one of the most attractive and beautiful farmsteads in the county.

Mr. Gooding has taken much interest in township affairs, and served as township treasurer and has been on the school board for fifteen years. He is an independent Republican in politics. His wife is a member of the Episcopal church. Mr. Gooding was married December 29, 1859, to Miss Ann Elizabeth Moon, a daughter of Solomon H. and Ann Maria Moon, the former a native of New York state and the latter of Switzerland. Her father died in 1830, at the age of thirty-nine, and her mother in 1885, at the age of seventy. Mr. and Mrs. Gooding have had three children: Fred S., who lives on one of his father's farms, married Jessie Pangborn, and they have four children, Anna Bell, Orion E., Julia E. and Jessie Grace; Mary Bell is the wife of James H. Richmond, of Portland, Oregon; and Frank R. was killed in a cyclone near Cherokee, Kansas, April 15, 1895.