Sarah (Coulson) GOODGE

GOODGE, WATERMAN, ELLIS, COULSON

Posted By: Sarah Thorson Little (email)
Date: 1/2/2012 at 18:26:39

August 23, 1861 --- February 11, 1964

Mrs. Sarah Goodge, a resident of Lake Cornelia [Wright County, Iowa] each summer, died Tuesday night, February 11, in Des Moines at the age of 102 years. Funeral services were held at 1:30 p. m. Friday at the Lilly Funeral Home in Des Moines, with burial in Laurel Hill Cemetery there.

Mrs. Goodge suffered a stroke last fall. Her sister, Mrs. Nora Waterman, died just last week at the age of 91 in Des Moines. Surviving besides her daughter and two grandchildren are one sister and one brother, Mrs. Lizzie Ellis of Estherville and Bert Coulson of Jefferson, Minn. Her parents immigrated to the United States from London and made their way to Nebraska by covered wagon. Mrs. Goodge was born in a tent at Ft Carney, NE where her father was stationed during the Civil War. Her mother did laundry for the soldiers. When she met her husband, the Coulson family was living in a sod house near Cimarron. Her father later moved to Northwest Iowa and was a circuit riding minister for the Methodist Church. The family has much musical talent & they could always gather enough good musicians together for an orchestra. Music has been a part of their lives. Mrs Goodge has always loved to dance. On August 20, 1961 she danced with several of the friends who were present at her 100th birthday party.

Mrs. Goodge said all members of her family had musical talent and could play several instruments. We had a family orchestra all the time," she said. Her daughter, Mrs. McCann, once headed a small orchestra that played for dances in the Des Moines area.

Sarah married John Goodge in 1876 at Cimmaron, NE. She and John rode ponies 30 miles across the uninhabited Nebraska prairie to find a minister at Cimarron, Nebr., to marry them. The country was so wild we both carried sharpshooters (rifles)," she recalled. The newlyweds built their own "sod shanty" on the Nebraska plains, using a cave in the side of a hillock and fronting it with layers of sod cut from the prairie. They made their own bed by weaving small tree branches and rope. Their fuel was "cow chips" gleaned from the prairie and prairie grass lengths which they twisted tightly into bundles. Mrs. Goodge recalled that her husband worked for a time for the Union Pacific helping build the "golden spike" railroad, the first to span the continent.

Mrs. Goodge said that while she and her husband were moving to Iowa one of her two daughters was born in a wagon en route. They settled first on a large farm near Sioux Rapids and later moved to Bancroft where her husband set up a blacksmith shop. He hauled the first load of timber to what is now the town of Armstrong, and later built the second building in that community and moved his blacksmith shop there. Goodge later set up a blacksmith shop at Estherville where he made buggies, surreys and wagons. In his later years he operated a neighborhood grocery store at Des Moines.