Jacob Elliott came to New Marblehead (now Windham) and settled on a 100-acre lot in 1763 and built a one-story house on what is now the Windham Center Road, near the Nash Road. That house eventually became part of the Goold house, a house which still stands today.

Benjamin Goold settled here in 1775. The Goold house was under construction in October of 1775 when Captain Mowat bombarded Portland.

Elliott had already sold part of his 100 acres to William Hanson and after Elliott died in 1817, his children sold the remaining 60 acres to Benjamin Goold’s son, Nathan, who had been born on a farm across the road. Goold leased a one-quarter acre to a widow, Dorothy Barton, and had a house hauled there for her home. When she died, the house was taken down.

Nathan Goold became a leading citizen of Windham and Maine. He was married and had five children. Tall and thin, he was a farmer who was also chairman of the selectmen for eight years, represented the town in 1816 to the court of Massachusetts; was a tax collector, moderator of town meetings, on the committee to separate Maine from Massachusetts, and a justice of the peace. He was the captain of the town’s militia and organized the first Sunday school. His death in 1823, at the age of 45, of consumption (TB) put a halt to his plans to build a brick house on a hill on Nash Road. (He made the bricks himself.) Around 1830, his son, William (1809-1890), moved Nathan’s one-story house across the road.

In 1823, the year Nathan Goold died, his 14-year-old son, William, left home to learn a trade, as his father had advised before he died. On a June day before he left, he took a drill and hammer and chiseled the date (1823) in block letters on a boulder back of the house.

William apprenticed himself to a tailor in Portland and walked the 11 miles home to Windham often during the seven years of apprenticeship. He worked at the tailor shop, at his employer’s house and for this he received board and his clothes. At the end of his apprenticeship, he was established in business and soon his younger brother went with him as an apprentice, eventually becoming a partner. William married the daughter of his tailor employer and lived in Portland.

The fields of the original farm became William Goold’s property and the back-land was divided among heirs and finally sold, leaving the farm with a much smaller area. The original farmhouse, since its removal from across the yard, was raised and enlarged twice.

In 1861, William Goold returned to Windham. Like his father, he was involved in politics and was a state senator, legislator and was best known as a writer of history. He published “Portland in the Past,” when he was 77 years old and was one of the original members of Maine Historical Society.

Goold decided to go south in 1864 to retrieve the bodies of two men who were relatives on his maternal side, and who had lost their lives during the Civil War. He got a letter of introduction from Secretary of the Treasury William Pitt Fessenden to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton when he was on his way to Fortress Monroe and the James River. Goold told people he was to go to City Point to “look after sick soldiers.”

When he returned to Windham, he brought with him the remains of Francis Clark Morton and Stephen Tukey Morton. Both were buried in the private family graveyard on the Goold farm, where five generations of the Goold family are buried.

The old Goold house and its unique family cemetery remain one of Windham’s most interesting homes.