LOCATION:
Goffs is located about twenty-eight kilometers north east of
Halifax at the beginning of the Old Guysborough Road, which connects
a number of small communities to the county of Guysborough.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Thomas Goff received a land grant on the Guysborough Road in 1843,
relocating his family here from Bedford. He was married to Eleanor
Holland, sister of Anthony Holland the founder of the Acadian
Recorder. Their eldest son William received a land grant on the
Guysborough Road in 1846 and their son Henry received a land grant in
1859. William married Hannah Dickey, daughter of Samuel Dickey of
Meaghers Grant. William and Hannah built a large farmhouse that also
served as an overnight inn for stage coaches enroute to Guysborough.
The stage coach stop at Goff's inn, and frequent references to it,
eventually led to the community being named Goffs. The former farm of
William Goff is now the Airlane Golf Club."
SETTLEMENT HISTORY:
The first land grants in the Goffs regions were issued in 1784,
mainly five to seven hundred acre lots destined for military
officers in the British army and government dignitaries and their
families. Most recipients looked on their grants as investments and
never bothered to settle on them.
Land was also granted to the Polluck family who built the Polluck
Inn (former Thirteen Mile House) in the early 1800s. Many a famous
person spent a night or two at the inn, including, in 1861, Edward,
Prince of Wales, who went hunting in the area. Arthur and Sarah
(MacDonald) Wilson bought the inn from her father William MacDonald
around 1900. The Wilson's demolished it and erected a family home in
its place. The property stayed in the Wilson family for several
generations.
MORE GENEALOGY:
Other families arrived over the years. Michael and Catherine
Smith came from Ireland in 1812 with their two children. Their
daughter Catherine married Henry MacDonald who had purchased land
from Theophiles Chamberlain in 1830. For the next one hundred years,
three generations of MacDonalds stayed on the farm.
Others who came included Captain John William Coote, an Irishman
and a widower who arrived in Halifax in 1849 with two young sons
while his other twelve remained in Ireland. He built a home on a
500-acre grant near Miller Lake, remarried and had a daughter who
married a MacDonald. Many of her descendants remain in the
community, Michael Bone of England, a former sergeant in the British
army, arrive in 1847.
William and James Topp of Scotland arrived in the 1850s to set up
a blacksmith shop. Sometime later, Irishman James Mulligan built a
home considered to be unusual for the times. He attached
outbuildings to the main house in a more European style. Not long
after came Michael Riley, another Irishman who specialized in
successfully planting orchards in rocky soil.
GOFFS TODAY:
Much of the original settlement of Goff now lies under the paved
runways of the Halifax International Airport constructed in 1960 and
the nearby 2000-acre AeroTech Industrial Park, which opened in 1985
- one of the fastest growing business parks in the province.
The Old Guysborough Road now passes by woods and scrub, dotted
with a few old farmhouses, although modern bungalows are now slowly
replacing some of those old buildings.
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©
1999-2004 by Halifax County NS Canada GenWeb and/or it's contributors
RETURN
TO NOVA SCOTIA GENWEB
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Halifax County Genweb Project
gratefully acknowledges the following sources:
Historical Information on many
community pages is from : One
City...Many Communities" co - published by Halifax Regional
Municipality and Nimbus, funded By the HRM Millennium
Committee.Author : Alfreda Withrow.
Mapeeze: Free map linking on
Destination Nova Scotia.
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