An alert reader (thanks, John!) sent along this article from the Feb. 27, 1951 Knickerbocker News, detailing the end of the line for the venerable Goold’s carriage company, which invented the Albany sleigh, created the first railroad cars, and built custom auto bodies. The company had a 138-year run.
Carriage Plant Bows to Time and Mass Production
The doors will close tomorrow on one of Albany’s oldest and most romantic businesses – one that a 100 [sic] years ago built stagecoaches and railroad cars for the great westward movement.
Ernest M. Goold, 66, of 187 S. Main Ave., last of the Goold carriagemakers, will end 138 years of the Goold Company’s business when he closes his automobile body repair shop at 81 N. Lake Ave.
The firm, which once employed 100 workers to make carriages, straight-runner sleighs and horsecars in a riverfront plant, has let its recent force of eight men go. They all have other jobs, said Mr. Goold. He said he has found the work “too confining” and plans to go into another business. William N. Nichols, 51 O’Connell St., shop superintendent who has been with the Goold Company 49 years, is going into the insurance business.
He noted also that the competition of automobile dealers who have their own body repair shops was a factor in the decision to end – not sell – the business. This recalled the way the mass production auto industry once affected the Goold Company’s special auto body manufacture, and how the railroad industry’s growth overwhelmed the Goold manufacture of railroad passenger cars, including the first to run in 1831.
“The last really creative job we did in the special body field,” said Mr. Goold, “was making buses such as that for the old Ten Eyck Hotel. They used it to meet guests at the steamship wharves and the railroad station.”
But Mr. Goold said the business, which supported the Goold family since 1813, had not failed.
James Goold, the founder, came from Pittsfield, Mass., in 1810, with a certification of his “more than common Mechanical Genius and … Sobriety and Strict Integrity,” signed by Stephen Van Rensselaer, for whom he built a fine old carriage, and two other prominent men. In 1813 he set up a chaise-making shop at Liberty and Union Sts. When fire destroyed the plant in 1837, many prominent Albany men subscribed to a loan to put the business back on its feet.
In 1831 the company built the two passenger coach bodies on the first steam passenger train in this country – the DeWitt Clinton, which made its historic journey from Albany to Schenectady on the old Mohawk & Hudson Railroad that year.
In 1850 the company built the first horsecar used in Albany, and later shipped many of them to South America. Later it sent railroad cars there.
At about this time the company moved into a larger plant in Broadway, which could be seen as one of Albany’s most imposing industrial structures by passengers coming up the Hudson on paddlewheel steamboats. Mr. Goold recalled those were the days of manufacturing the Goold-patented straight-runner sleighs.
About 1903 William D. Goold completed plans for an automobile, but directors of the firm voted them down, calling automobiles “just a fad.” But William Goold, father of Earnest [sic], later made special bodies for the cars of some wealthy Albany families, including those of Parker Corning and James Fennimore [sic] Cooper, lawyer descendant of the novelist.
“They were very modern and up-to-date” jobs, said Ernest Goold. Many of the bodies were for old steamers and the old one-lung (cylinder) Oldsmobile.”
Ernest Goold said the array of company documents on the shop’s walls will be taken into his home and that of his daughter. Mrs. Albert Hessberg 2d. They soon may be exhibited at the Albany Institute of History and Art, he said. He said the shop building has been sold to Joseph Miller, who operates a grocery next door.