Hanover Inn Memories
Last year we discovered an historic guest registry dating from the Hanover Inn’s 1839-1843 seasons in Rauner Library’s archives. The registry contains names, hometowns, room numbers, meals taken, and horses stabled of each arriving guest in that four year period. These years were among the last that the hotel primarily served stagecoach traffic that passed through Hanover on the way further into the New England frontier or inbound to Boston. In 1847, the arrival of the railroad across the river in Norwich’s village of Lewiston marked the beginning of the modern era in Hanover, shortening the distance to Boston considerably.
For much of the 19th century, the hotel was called the Dartmouth Hotel, the latest evolution of what began its life as a tavern. After a fire in 1887 the building that rose from the ashes was the central structure of what is today known as The Hanover Inn
Dartmouth Hotel Guest Ledger, February 1842
Every now and then as we revisit this guest registry, a name will jump off the page and insist on a little research to complete the picture. This month, we did some digging on a pair of names we discovered checking into the hotel on February 28, 1842 and discovered a story that gives us a window into the divides that fractured families in the middle of the 19th century at the outbreak of the Civil War. Let’s take a closer look at the lives of John W. Goodwin and John N. Goodwin of South Berwick, Maine, who arrived in Hanover for a stay at the Dartmouth Hotel 183 years ago today:
The town of Berwick was founded before the state of Maine. Then a frontier of northern Massachusetts, Berwick became the domain of several prominent early American families including the Goodwins, whose various branches produced several notable citizens in the 18th and 19th century.
According to our research, one of our two Goodwins in the Dartmouth Hotel’s guestbook is John Wallingford Goodwin (1825 - 1911), descended from a prosperous branch of the family whose patriarch, General Ichabod Goodwin (1743-1829), was a militia leader, innkeeper, merchant, and founder of Berwick Academy. The other Goodwin in the registry appears to be John Noble Goodwin (1824 - 1887, Dartmouth ‘44), a third generation Berwick Goodwin. Though we couldn’t find a decisive link in their family tree, it seems likely that the two Goodwins who checked into the Dartmouth Hotel in 1842 were distant cousins. We do know that they both attended Berwick Academy at the same time though, which may be how the distant cousins came to know each other.
The classmates and presumed cousins were 17 & 18 years old when they checked into the Hanover Inn on February 28, 1842. They lodged in room six of the Dartmouth Hotel, took their lunch at the hotel, and stabled no horses. It wouldn’t be another four years until the railroad arrived in Hanover, which means that they likely arrived on one of the stagecoach lines that passed through Hanover; one popular route from Hanover to Boston passed through Berwick, Maine.
The Dartmouth Hotel, late 19th Century: Dartmouth College Archives, Rauner Library
It’s possible that they were there for an old fashioned college visit! John N. would go on to enroll in Dartmouth College and graduate two years later. John W. would matriculate at Bowdoin College, where many of his brand of the Goodwin clan, including his older brother (more on him later) had also attended. After graduating from their respective colleges, John W. became a civil engineer and John N. studied law.
In 1848 the two embarked on permanently diverged paths amid the growing tension leading up to the Civil War. That year, John N. was admitted to the Bar and began practicing in Maine. John W., meanwhile, went south and was employed as a surveyor for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. In 1854, John N. was elected to the Maine Senate and was elected to congress, and one month after his swearing in the the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter.
Still working with the railroad when war broke out, John W. joined a Rifle regiment from Mobile which served in the 3rd Alabama Regiment of the Confederate States of America. While his friend and Dartmouth Hotel roommate, John N. Goodwin sat in Congress, John W. Goodwin was building fortifications at Norfolk and earning the rank of Major on General Bragg’s staff, where he fought at the battles of Corinth and Chattanooga. This was by no means the only strained relationship that John W. must have experienced during the Civil War, according to the Old Berwick Historical Society, his older brother Ichabod was a professed admirer of Abraham Lincoln and would take a position in Lincoln’s administration after the outbreak of war.
Ichabod & John W. Goodwin: Old Berwick Historical Society
After serving his one term in Congress, John N. Goodwin was appointed Governor of the Arizona Territory. His Lincoln-Republican values show through in his first acts in the first Arizona Territorial Legislature of 1864 when he abolished peonage and imprisonment for debts, laws inherited from the Territory of New Mexico, from which Arizona was divided.
John N. Goodwin from History of Arizona: Volume III
John W. Goodwin never moved back north. According to Old Berwick Historical Society,
[John W.] and his wife, a Georgia Smith, had four children, who all remained in the South. From the 1870s, John W. helped build the Texas Eastern and Western Railroad, the Texas Central, the Southern Pacific, the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe, and the International Great Northern. In 1883 he returned to Tennessee as division superintendent of the East Tennessee Virginia and Georgia Railroad.
This researcher couldn’t find any evidence to indicate whether the schoolmates from Berwick Academy ever reunited, but as John W.’s railroad lines stretched west, one can’t help but wonder if the two ever reconnected over a mutual interest in the growing American West.
John N. Goodwin died in Monterrey, California in 1887 and John W. Goodwin would live until 1911.