California Biographies 

Source:
History of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties, California
by: C M Gidney - Santa Barbara. Benjamin Brooks - San Luis Obispo. 
Edwin M Sheridan - Ventura
Volumes II - Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, ILL., 1917

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

 
  
REV. BENJAMIN A. GOODRIDGE has been the minister of the Unitarian Church in Santa Barbara since 
April, 1901. He was born at Lyndeborough, New Hampshire, on the 5th of October, 1857, and in both 
lines of descent he comes of sterling English colonial stock in New England. The first representative of 
the Goodridge family in this country came from Bury Saint Edmunds, England, in 1640, and settled in 
Massachusetts.  
 
The subject of this sketch is a son of Benjamin and Irene (Wardwell) Goodridge. His mother was a 
native of Penobscot, Maine, and it was in that state that he spent his boyhood, for his father died 
when the son was but six weeks old, and within a few years his mother took her  
children and made a home in Bucksport, Maine. It was there that she died in 1870.  

Mr. Goodridge attended the public schools in his Maine home, but on the death of his mother went to 
live in Tilton, New Hampshire, where he fitted for college. With intervals of teaching in order to supply 
himself with funds, he succeeded in graduating from Boston University in 1881, as Bachelor of Arts. For 
two years following his graduation he taught Greek and Latin at Lasell Seminary, Auburn- dale, 
Massachusetts. The next two years he was principal of Powers Institute in Bernardston, 
Massachusetts. He then went to North Carolina, where for a time he was engaged in teaching, but 
mainly in newspaper work until 1889.
 
 It was in that year that Mr. Goodridge entered the Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. There he completed about two-thirds of the work necessary for graduation, and then, 
having a chance to spend a year in Europe, in travel and study, he took steamer from New York to 
Genoa, Italy.  

In the early summer of 1891 he was again in Massachusetts, doing literary work, and spent some 
months in one of the editorial rooms of a Boston newspaper before he began preaching. In the winter 
of 1892 he made application to the New England Fellowship Committee of the Unitarian Church, was 
accepted at once, and for a time supplied the pulpit of the church at West Upton, Massachusetts, and 
later at Framingham , in the same state.
 
He was then called to the church in Harvard, Massachusetts, and was formally ordained to the 
Unitarian ministry in that parish in October, 1892. There he remained two years and a half and was 
called from that church to Christ Church, in the Dorchester District of Boston. Six years was the length 
of his pastorate in Boston. In April 1901 he was settled over the Unitarian Church in Santa Barbara, 
California, where he has ever since remained.  

Mr. Goodridge has always taken a deep interest in civic affairs wherever he has been located and has 
sought to be of service. For twelve years he was a member of the board of trustees of the Santa 
Barbara Free Public Library, for four years its secretary, and for eight its president. He is a member of 
the local Harvard Club.  

On the 30th of November, 1882, at Windham, Maine, Mr. Goodridge was married to Miss Julia E. 
Wiggin, who was born and reared in that state, and comes of a family with many generations of New 
England descent. They have one daughter, Elaine, who married Henry W. Howard of Santa Barbara. 
She and her husband live in Oregon.