Charles A. Goodyear

Of the hundreds of men who are today successfully following the lumber business, many of them, perhaps a majority of them, are descendants of lumbermen. The trade is conspicuously one that appears to offer superior attractions over all other commercial lines to the descendants, in the second, and, in many instances, the third and succeeding generations, of men who hewed their fortunes from the forest. Charles A. Goodyear, of Chicago, Illinois, is one of those whose ancestors for four generations were lumbermen.

The first of the Goodyear family in America was Stephen Goodyear, a London merchant, who associated himself with other merchants in chartering the ship Hector^ which sailed from England in 1637 and whose passengers founded the colony of New Haven, in what is now Connecticut. Stephen Goodyear was one of the eminent men of his day and took a prominent part in the civic affairs of the colony, serving as deputy governor from 1643 until his death, in 1658. Of the ancestry of Deputy Governor Goodyear, the records give a meager account, but enough is gleaned from them to establish the fact that he was a lineal descendant of Sir William Goodere, who was knighted by James I, at Whitehall, July 23, 1603. The earliest ancestor of which there is record was Richard Goodere, Lord of Poynton, in Cheshire, who died, it is believed, while on an expedition with King Edward I, in 1307. The King was preparing to invade Scotland at the time and it is inferred that Lord Poynton was a member of his forces. Richard, the son, built a house at Monckinge Hadley, near Carlisle, and all of the Gooderes mentioned in the early annals appear to have originated in that section of Cumberland.

Charles Adams Goodyear, of Chicago, is the great-great-great-grandson, in direct line, of Stephen Goodyear, the New Haven colonist. He is one of those to whom the lumber business comes by inheritance, and the fact that he is so well qualified and so uniformly successful in his chosen occupation is attributable to his forbears on both sides of the house who were lumbermen. His maternal grandfather, Charles C. Waterhouse was a lumberman of Havana, New York, and afterward engaged in the California lumber trade with headquarters at Brooklyn, New York, shipping lumber around the Horn during the gold fever years, between 1849 and 1852. Two younger members of the Goodyear family are today among the heaviest operators in the trade, Charles Waterhouse Goodyear and Frank Henry Goodyear, of Buffalo, New York, who comprise the widely known firm of F.H. & C.W. Goodyear, owning, besides large lumber and railroad interests in Pennsylvania, some of the most extensive tracts of timber and manufacturing interests in yellow pine in the southern states. One of the noted members of the family was Charles Goodyear, the celebrated inventor of vulcanized rubber, who died in i860, and who in his three-score years accomplished wonderful results in the advancement of science and commerce.

Darius Adams Goodyear, father of Charles A. Goodyear, married Mary Ann Waterhouse on May 25, 1848. Two years before that he engaged with his future wife's father, C.C. Waterhouse, in the lumber business in Brooklyn. The son was born to the couple, September 22, 1849. The family remained in Brooklyn until 1858, when the senior Mr. Goodyear sold his interests and moved to Portage, Wisconsin, where he again embarked in the lumber business, the firm being Mann & Goodyear. Young Goodyear was educated in Portage and graduated from the high school at the age of sixteen years. When out of school he entered the business of his father, and, though but a youth, he quickly familiarized himself with its details. Mann & Goodyear floated lumber down the Wisconsin River to Portage, from which point it was distributed to yards of their own and to various dealers along the Mississippi River.

In 1876 Mr. Goodyear's father took him into partnership, the firm becoming D.A. & C.A. Goodyear, the center of their operations then being at Mather, Wisconsin. In 1883 the yard and office were moved to Tomah, where, in 1888, one of the largest and most modern sawmills in the Northwest was built. The mill has been remodeled several times and its present equipment comprises two bands and a band resaw, with a daily capacity of 100,000 feet. At the outset the firm owned timber adjacent to Tomah, but as this was cut out other acreage was bought in the northern part of Wisconsin and the logs brought to the mill by rail, a haul of 200 miles, in some instances. In 1906 the supply of logs came from Vilas County, where the company owns a tract of 35,000,000 feet of pine. When that timber is cut out the operations will be started on a tract of approximately 300,000,000 feet in Gogebic County, Michigan. Mr. Goodyear bought the latter property in 1905 and has further provided for his manufacturing operations by securing about 1,000,000,000 feet of fir, spruce and cedar on Puget Sound, Washington.

Mr. Goodyear bought the interest of his father in the firm of D.A. & C.A. Goodyear, at Tomah, in 1899, and continued the business under his own name until January 1, 1906, when it was incorporated under the laws of Wisconsin as the C. A. Goodyear Lumber Company, with a capital of $500,000. The officers are Charles A. Goodyear, president; Lamont Rowlands, vice president and general manager, and Miles A. Goodyear, secretary. D. A. Goodyear died August 20, 1905,

Mr. Goodyear married Miss Fannie Stewart, daughter of Judge Alva Stewart, of Portage, Wisconsin, September 11, 1872. Five children, three sons and two daughters, were born to the couple. Miles A. Goodyear, the surviving son, is secretary of the C.A. Goodyear company. Charles McPherson Goodyear, another son, died in 1895. ^^^ o^ ^^e daughters, Ellen Josephine, is the wife of Lamont Rowlands, vice president and general manager of the Goodyear company, and the other one, Mary Belle, is the wife of George C. Hodges, of Chicago. Alva Stewart Goodyear, Mr. Goodyear's oldest son, who had risen to the position of manager of the operations of the concern at Tomah, died May 13, 1904, at the age of twenty-nine years. He served as acting captain of Company K, Third Wisconsin Regiment, during the Spanish- American War, and during the campaign in Porto Rico he contracted malarial fever, which was primarily responsible for his death five years later. To add to Mr. Goodyear's grief, Mrs. Goodyear, who had been ill for several months previous to Alva's death, suffered such a shock that she, too, succumbed, her death occurring twelve days after that of her son.

Although Mr. Goodyear always has been a consistent supporter of the policies of the Republican party, he never has sought nor has he held public ofHce. At one time he was nominated for Congress, but withdrew. At another time he was nominated for the Wisconsin State Senate, but declined the honor. Mr. Goodyear is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Union League Club and the Kenwood Club, of Chicago. In 1903 he built a handsome residence at 4840 Greenwood Avenue, Chicago. The architecture is of early English style. Valuable assistance in formulating the plans was given by Mrs. Rowlands, and many of the attractive features of the home are due to her intimate knowledge of old English country houses.

Mr. Goodyear possesses democratic manners and has never been accused of regarding himself as being in any sense above the common level of humanity. Having led a busy life and in his youth encountered hardships and endured privations in the endeavor to establish a business, he is prone to carry himself, in years of maturity and affluence, as simply and as far removed from ostentation as any of his several hundred employees. Frills of any sort are not to his liking and he cordially detests many of the so-called regulations of a social order with which he neither sympathizes nor affiliates. None the less does he conduct himself at all times as becoming one who is the descendant of generations of gentlemen.