James Goodwin was born in Hartford in 1803 at his family’s home, the Goodwin Tavern, which was at the corner of Albany Avenue and Irving Street. The tavern was a stop on the stagecoach line between Hartford and Albany, and that led to James’s first job at the Morgan Tavern, which was a stop on the stagecoach line between New York and Boston. Morgan’s Tavern was run by Joseph Morgan, whose son was Junius Morgan and grandson was J. Pierpont Morgan, and Joseph’s daughter Lucy married James Goodwin. James eventually became an agent for the line and then its proprietor, and he would come to control the postal contracts for Connecticut. James correctly guessed that the railroads would put him out of business, and between 1835 and 1840 he completely divested himself from his stagecoach business. He did some farming (on Farmington Avenue), he got involved in insurance (he was president of Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company and a director of Hartford Fire Insurance Company), he bought a lot of real estate, and in 1872 he began construction of his new home at the corner of Woodland Street and Asylum Avenue – the Goodwin Castle.
The Goodwin Castle was considered the largest house built in Hartford at the time, and as it was under construction it became something of a local attraction, with people walking around the interior of the house at their leisure. The house was finished in 1873, and it cost $400,000 to build, which would be equivalent to almost $10.5 million today. James Goodwin lived in the house until his death in 1878.
James Junius Goodwin was James Goodwin’s son and Francis Goodwin’s brother. He left Hartford in 1859 to find his way in business, and he entered a business partnership with his cousin, J. P. Morgan. That business became Drexel Morgan & Company, which was the predecessor of JPMorgan Chase. James Junius retired from active business in 1871, and he returned to Hartford following the death of his father in 1878. He formed a partnership with Francis, J. J. & F Goodwin, to manage the Goodwin Estate, and he took up residence in the Goodwin Castle, where he lived until his death in 1915.
At some point after James Junius Goodwin’s death, the family sold the Goodwin Castle to the Aetna Fire Insurance Company, with the stipulation that James Junius’s wife, Josephine, would be allowed to use the Castle until her death. She maintained the Castle mostly as her summer home until her death in 1939, at which point Aetna Fire finally took title – but then they bought an office building downtown, so they had no real need for the Castle at that point. The house was demolished in May 1940, and the only surviving part of it is the parlor, which was donated to the Wadsworth Atheneum (Josephine’s nephew, Charles A. Goodwin, was on the board of the Atheneum at this time). The site was not occupied again until 1956, when the current building, now the Classical Magnet School, was constructed for the Factory Insurance Association.
