James Walker Goss was born on December 29, 1812, in Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third and oldest son of Rev. John Goss and Jane Walker. The elder Goss had been a tutor in the family of Gov. James Barbour and later became a Baptist minister.
James was educated by his father, private tutors, and in a local academy. He planned to study medicine, but after spending part of one year at the University of Virginia he forsook medicine for the ministry, and in 1832 was licensed to preach by the Baptists.
A venture in financing an apothecary establishment at Charlottesville resulted in his bankruptcy and the sacrifice of his property to satisfy the creditors. Goss again turned to the ministry and as a result of reading Alexander Campbell’s Christian Baptist came to see, as he thought, “the true light. ”
His Campbellite views created a division in his congregation, and in 1836 he helped to form a Christian church in Charlottesville. The Baptists excluded him from their communion, and, spurred on by the personal antagonisms resulting from the controversy, he began his work as a minister of the Disciples with energy, making preaching tours and establishing churches in neighboring counties without remuneration.
After 1845, he was interested primarily in education. He established a school for girls in 1851 at Gordonsville, Virginia, which in 1856 was moved to Albemarle County and renamed Piedmont Female Academy.
He conducted it until 1867 when he went to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to take charge of the Southern Kentucky Female Institute.
Stricken with paralysis two years later and forced to return to Virginia, he died at Piedmont, near Charlottesville, in 1870.
Goss did more than any other to lay the foundation and promote the early growth of the Churches of Christ in Virginia. He aided in the publication of the Christian Publisher 1836-40, the first periodical published by the Disciples of the Alleghanies, and from 1843 to 1845, he was its sole editor and publisher, its name having been changed to the Christian Intelligencer.
Goss was a man of unusual energy, somewhat better educated than his contemporaries among the Disciples, and possessed an indomitable will that led him to sacrifice much to propagate a faith that had “only the Bible as its textbook. ”
On September 29, 1835, Goss married Jane Ashley Grigsby, daughter of Joseph Grigsby.
13 July 1775 - 4 July 1835
1775 - 1862
1817 - 1838
1814 - 1882
27 April 1811 - 31 May 1883
17 November 1813 - 8 August 1895
1855 - 1934
2 March 1838 - 1 October 1902
