1848.
John Franklin Goodrich.
Private 21st Iowa Vols. (Infantry), August 28, 1862; died at Vicksburg, Miss., June 4, 1863, of disease contracted in the service.John Franklin Goodrich was the son of Allen and Mary (Emerson) Goodrich, and was born in Mount Vernon, New Hampshire, August 13, 1826. He was fitted for college by Mrs. Ripley of Waltham, Massachusetts. In college he was not prominent as a scholar, nor very well known among his classmates; but the respect in which he was held was manifested at a class dinner, a few years after graduating, when he had gone to California, by the wish, pithily expressed in a toast, ‘that he might become as rich as he was good.’ After graduation he was employed for one year as clerk in one of the manufacturing companies at Waltham. At the beginning of the California gold excitement he visited that region, remaining there five years, and obtaining a respectable competence by labor in the mines. Returning, he purchased a farm in Epworth, Dubuque County, Iowa. He was there married, September 12, 1857, to Miss Marion Pratt, whose family had emigrated to Iowa from Connecticut. They had three children,—two sons and a daughter,—and were living in prosperity on their farm when the war began. In August, 1862, at the age of thirty-six, he enlisted as a private in the Twenty-first Iowa Volunteers (Infantry), Colonel Samuel Merrill. In a subsequent letter, referring to this enlistment (October 17, 1862), he says:—
If there had been an abundance of young men in our State ready to enlist, I should undoubtedly have remained at home. But it was not so. The alternative remained for me to enlist and be removed far away from all the sweet amenities of home, incur all the risks of war in all its varied forms,—and those on the battlefield are not the greatest,—or remain at home in peace, and have
