Gooding, William

Born: 1803-04-01 Bristol, New York

Died: 1878-03-04 Lockport, Illinois

William Gooding was a civil engineer, merchant, railroad executive, and public works board member. He first worked as an engineer on the Welland Canal in Canada, starting in 1827, under an apprenticeship with the project's resident engineer. He returned to the United States in the spring of 1829, and worked as a merchant in Lockport, New York for a time before returning to engineering work in Ohio. There he served as an assistant engineer for the state, aiding in the construction of a canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth. In May 1832 in Troy, New York, he married Anna M. Cutting, with whom he eventually had at least seven children. He returned to Ohio after his marriage, but relocated to Chicago in May 1833, squatting upon land his father and brothers had previously occupied. After conducting a survey for the Wabash and Erie Canal for the Commissioners of Public Works in Indiana in 1835-36, he was selected as the chief engineer of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He held this position until 1848, also worked as a United States Engineer, and completed work for the city of Chicago while the canal was under construction. By 1850, he was doing well enough that, even with his large family, he owned $5,500 in real estate. In 1855, he and his business partners formed the Joliet and Chicago Railroad, of which he eventually became president. From 1849 until after the Civil War, he served on the Illinois and Michigan Canal's Board of Trustees as its secretary and assistant treasurer.

Roberta M. Styran and Robert R. Taylor, This Great National Object: Building the Nineteenth-Century Welland Canals (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University, 2012), 78, 81; The History of Will County, Illinois (Chicago: Wm. Le Baron, Jr., 1878), 302; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Lockport, Will County, IL, 20; “An Act to Construct a Railroad from Joliet to Chicago,” 15 February 1855, Private Laws of Illinois (1855), 263; Engineering News (Chicago: Geo. H. Frost, 1878), 5:83; Gravestone, Lockport Cemetery, Lockport, IL.