Stephen Lincoln Goodale was an agriculturist. He eventually developed a collection which has been called one of the finest in the state.
Background
Stephen Lincoln Goodale was born on August 14, 1815, at South Berwick, Maine. He was the son of Enoch Goodale and his wife Lucy, daughter of Stephen and Lydia (Foster) Lincoln.
The year after his birth, the family moved to Saco, Maine, where Enoch Goodale established himself as a druggist, selling also chemicals and books. Stephen helped in the store, which was frequented by physicians, and in response to his early environment developed an interest in science, particularly chemistry.
Education
Goodale attended the public schools and at thirteen entered Thornton Academy.
Since leaving school, he had maintained his habits of study, his chief interests being pharmacy (chemistry) and agriculture.
Career
After a three years’ course, although he had a keen taste for study and investigation, Goodale followed a life-long practical bent and went into business with his father. In 1837, when he was twenty-two, this business came under his control.
Three years after his marriage, he bought a place in Saco he began at once to use the extensive grounds surrounding his house for the cultivation and scientific study of trees and shrubs.
His interest in scientific agriculture led to his election in 1856 as first secretary of the reorganized State Board of Agriculture, a position which he occupied with great satisfaction to the Board and the State for seventeen years. His work was much more than secretarial, it was broadly educational. His first report, for the year 1856, contained 134 pages, 115 of which were written entirely by himself.
He had an important part in the scientific and agricultural surveys of Maine and carried on an extensive correspondence with scientists in Germany and England.
While he was secretary of the Board of Agriculture, he also managed an extensive nursery, was president of the Saco and Biddeford Savings Institution, and was president, manager, and chemist of the Cumberland Bone Company, manufacturers of fertilizer.
Achievements
Goodale developed a collection of the cultivation and scientific study of trees and shrubs which has been called one of the finest, if not the very finest, in the state.
Views
In view of the newness of agricultural discussion from the standpoint of science, in his reports Goodale remarkably discriminating review of such scientific knowledge in the fields of chemistry, botany, forestry, vegetable and fruit growing, and animal husbandry as seemed to be applicable to agricultural practise. It is typical of the author’s efforts in behalf of agriculture during the next sixteen years.
In his succeeding reports, most of which he wrote himself, he continued his educational work by discussing the newer phases of knowledge in their relation to agriculture, treating of such subjects as the dairy, fruit culture, and the principles of breeding.
In 1861, he published The Principles of Breeding: or, Glimpses at the Physiological Laws Involved in the Reproduction and Improvement of Domestic Animals, which was used as a text-book in some of the agricultural colleges. Goodale was much interested in the founding of Maine’s land-grant college, the State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, later the University of Maine, which for ten years he served as trustee.
While some of his views as to what the “Farmer’s College, ” as he termed it, should be and do are now discarded, there is little doubt but that his influence was a noteworthy factor in preparing the state to welcome it.
Personality
Saco was his residence throughout Goodale's life, and there he died in his eighty-third year. His oldest son, George Lincoln Goodale, also active in the fields of applied science and scientific education, was for many years professor of natural history at Harvard.
Quotes from others about the person
“For forty years, Goodale carried on experiments in the application of science to plant life, agriculture, forestry, fruit and flower culture, and artificial fertilizers. ”
Connections
On September 23, 1838, Goodale married Prudence Aiken Nourse of Bangor, Maine.
