William Prevost Goodelle, Esq.
Early Life
William P. Goodelle was born on May 25, 1838 on a farm in Tully, N.Y. just south of Syracuse. His parents were Aaron B. Goodelle, a successful farmer, and Eleanor A. Prevost. After obtaining his elementary education at the local common schools, he attended the Homer Academy for a year, then completed the five-year college preparatory course at the Cazenovia Seminary. In the spring of 1861, he enrolled as a sophomore at Dartmouth College and graduated with the class of 1863 with high honors.
When he returned to Central New York, he taught school for one year at the Moravia Academy, and then moved to Syracuse to study law at the firm of L. H. & F. Hiscock. Only a few months later he was invited to take charge of the school at Onondaga Valley that was in need of reorganization. He worked there for two years while continuing his legal education part-time at the Hiscock firm. He gave up teaching in 1866 to devote himself to the study of law. He was admitted to the bar in October 1868. He worked at the Hiscock firm for one more year before opening his own private practice in 1869.
He married Marion H. Averill of Baldwinsville, NY on Sept. 8, 1869. The couple settled on James Street in Syracuse, then one of the most preferred residential streets in the city. For most of their married life they lived at 900 James Street, at its intersection with Highland Street.
In 1871, after only three years in practice, William Goodelle was elected District Attorney of Onondaga County. After serving his term of three years, he returned to private practice specializing in criminal law. He was immediately retained by the New York Central Railroad to investigate and aid in the prosecution of crimes committed on their line anywhere between Albany and Buffalo. He so effectively discharged these duties that he was credited with significantly reducing railroad crime in that section.
His private practice thrived as his reputation spread across upstate New York. In 1876 William Nottingham came to work for the firm while studying law with Goodelle. Nottingham became Goodelle’s law partner in 1879. The partners established their offices in the Clinton Block located along the Erie Canal on the west side of Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse. Over the course of the next decade their law firm became one of the preeminent firms in the city.
Adirondack explorations
Goodelle was by all accounts a dedicated outdoorsman who had been camping in the Adirondacks regularly since at least 1883. He favored the upper Beaver River in the west-central region for his camping trips. He explored that area while it was still wild and before the river was dammed. He often camped at Smith’s Lake on fishing trips that could last for a several weeks. This beautiful lake, now known as Lake Lila, had an established camping ground of rustic shelters known as the Syracuse Camp regularly used by modestly wealthy businessmen, lawyers and judges from that city. The same group later patronized the Smith’s Lake Hotel operated by Ella and James Lamont.
When all the land surrounding Smith’s Lake was purchased by Dr. Webb in 1891 to create his great camp Nehasane, the Smith’s Lake Hotel was closed. Undeterred, Goodelle joined with a few dozen others he had met on prior camping trips to create the Beaver River Club in 1892 [see my post of 05/03/21]. They purchased the Dunbar Hotel at Stillwater along with its cabins and 200 acres. The club also leased 6000 adjoining acres as their private game preserve. Goodelle was elected president of the club in 1895 and served in that role until 1910. Although his cottage was destroyed in 1911 in a fire caused by lightening, he remained a member of the club for the rest of his life.
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| Goodelle fishing near the Beaver River Club |
1894 Constitutional Convention
As a result of his prominence in the legal community, Goodelle was selected as a delegate-at-large to the 1894 New York State Constitutional Convention. When the convention took up the question of a proposed amendment intended to protect state-owned forest land, Goodelle rose to speak in favor of the amendment. He congratulated the New York Board of Trade and Transportation for their strong support for constitutional protection of the state’s Forest Preserve from further depredation by unscrupulous lumbermen. He also praised the work of the drafting committee for their careful consideration of the issue and for the wording of the proposed amendment.
He noted that as a devoted sportsman himself he was personally familiar with the importance of the issue having spent many happy days over the years vacationing at Smith’s Lake and all along the Beaver River. Based on his personal experience he proposed one small but important change to the proposed amendment. He suggested that the word “destroyed” be added to the end so it would read: "the lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold, or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed, or destroyed.”
Goodelle argued this addition was necessary because the lumber industry was constantly lobbying the legislature to allocate public money to build new dams in the Adirondacks to provide water to float great rafts of softwood logs to their mills. Using the situation of the Beaver River as an example, he described the thousands of trees killed and left standing by the 1885 and the 1893 Stillwater dams. Goodelle believed that if the constitution prohibited not only the cutting of trees but also their destruction by other means such as flooding, then building new dams that would flood hundreds or even thousands of acres would be forever prevented.
He further noted that although the State Forest Commission was legally charged with the protection of the state’s forests, recent events showed the commissioners were closely aligned with the financial interests of the lumbermen. Indeed, it was because the Forest Commission was facilitating wide-spread logging on the Forest Preserve that a constitutional amendment was needed. In support of this last point, Goodelle noted that during the past few years the Forest Commission itself was systematically manipulating the water released from the Stillwater dam to benefit the downstream logging business of Theodore Basselin, one of the three Forest Commissioners.
Goodelle was an effective orator. His revision was adopted and the revised amendment was later approved unanimously. Article VII, Section 7 of the Constitution, [now Article XIV, Section 1], popularly known as the ‘Forever Wild” provision, went into effect on January 1, 1895. Unfortunately, in 1913 the state legislature circumvented the prohibition on destroying the forest with an amendment that specifically allowed for up to 3% of the Forest Preserve to be flooded to create or enlarge reservoirs. Only a few years later in 1925, the gates closed on the greatly enlarged Stillwater dam, completely flooding four thousand acres of forest including Goodelle’s beloved Beaver River Club. The pressure to build more dams in the Adirondacks continued until 1953 when voters approved the Ostrander Amendment to the state constitution that explicitly banned the building of river-regulating reservoirs anywhere on the Forest Preserve.
Thus, as it turns out, Goodelle was on the right side of history on this issue. Although his one-word contribution to the Forever Wild provision did not put an end to dam building on Adirondack rivers, it gave future conservationists a valuable tool to protect the forest, one that continues in use today.
Later life
With his law practice firmly established, Goodelle devoted himself to projects aimed at advancing the legal profession. He was elected President of the Onondaga County Bar Association in 1891 and remained in that position through 1902. His term of eleven years makes him the longest serving president of the Onondaga County Bar Association to the present date.
For a number of years in the early 1890s Goodelle was also a member of the local judicial district’s board of law examiners. In December 1894 the local boards were abolished and replaced with the State Board of Law Examiners. Goodelle was appointed to the first three-member state board of which he soon became chairman. He continued in that role until 1918.
As his law firm prospered, he and Nottingham added more partners. In 1900 they moved their offices to the S A & K Building at the triangular intersection of Washington, Genesee and Warren Streets. The iconic “flat-iron” style building, originally known as the Granger Block, was purchased by the law firm of Sedgwick, Andrews & Kennedy in 1898, and given its new name. This historic building now houses offices for the City of Syracuse, and my barber.
In addition to his many other community activities, Goodelle was a long-time member and strong supporter of the Onondaga Historical Association and of the Century Club. At the age of 80 he was in good health and still regularly attended to duties at the law firm he founded. After an illness of three months, he died of angina at his James Street home on June 13, 1918. He was buried in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery next to his wife Marion who had died in 1901.
Sources
Dwight Hall Bruce, Onondaga’s Centennial, Gleanings of a Century, 1896, Vol. 2, pp. 133 – 138.
Wm. P. Goodelle Obituary, Syracuse Herald, June 13, 1918, pp. 6 – 7.
Frank Graham, Jr. The Adirondack Park, A Political History, 1978, pp. 126 – 132.
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