An old friend says Peanie Goodwin packed four lives into 62 years of life. Today, his standing as an Upper Valley legend seems to grow larger and larger, some 36 years after his death.
Peanie is a diminutive of Peanut, a nickname he was tagged with owing to his smaller stature as a youngster. His real first name was Edmond. As a man, he was admired by many and feared by many more.
A trove of stories about his exploits could fill a large volume; files of news clippings pulled off the internet offer tens of thousands of words detailing his involvement with landowners and government agencies and forays into a dizzying array of business ventures.
Upper Valley people might never have met the man, but most back then had surely heard of him. Today there’s a good chance his name will pop up in a real estate title ownership chain, for his activities involved thousands upon thousands of acres of property represented in countless deeds and conveyances. He bought real estate and he sold real estate, sometimes two or three times with the same piece.
And around him grew the stories. Some will say they’re mostly myth, but those alive in Goodwin’s time will surely attest to the truth — and often toss in that there’s even more and better stuff in the tale being told.
So what were the four lives of Peanie Goodwin?
First would have to be his youth working in the woods as a logger. He started with a bucksaw and an ax and twitched out the logs with a team of horses. Farmers who knew Goodwin then told how he would come around looking to trade some firewood for hay to feed his horses. It was tough work, involving hard physical labor amid every kind of weather. Things would change with the advent of the chainsaw and then a small bulldozer to haul out the logs.
He would develop a keen eye for the value of standing timber and what it could bring when brought to the sawmill, something that would serve him well his entire life. Circa 1950, loggers bought “stumpage,” standing trees, but often the land beneath the trees would be thrown into the deal for little or no additional money. At the time, land that had been logged was considered almost valueless, or might go for $10 an acre.
But Goodwin was way ahead of the conventional wisdom when he sensed that the interstate highways slowly advancing toward the Upper Valley from downcountry might boost the value of raw land. This would open the next chapter in his life. He began to develop a business model that included heavy logging followed by offering the land for sale at a price that covered his initial cost of acquiring the property.
But banks at that time didn’t loan money for land investment, so Goodwin began financing land sales himself, typically taking 5% down with a mortgage at 6%. If buyers defaulted, he’d just find another buyer. Goodwin once said it got so he could live totally on the interest collected from the mortgagors.
Wayne McCutcheon, a lifelong land surveyor based in Claremont, was kept busy laying out lots on land that Goodwin owned. It was a time when most Upper Valley towns still hadn’t enacted subdivision regulations, so carving up lots for resale was a fairly simple proposition. McCutcheon would go on to handle hundreds of survey projects for Goodwin, all the way up to Goodwin’s death in 1990. Today he recalls dealing with Goodwin as demanding but fair.
Goodwin would turn logging work over to contractors and shift his focus to buying and selling real estate all over the Upper Valley, invariably making money, and moving him onto another step in his life. At one point he owned hundreds of apartments in Lebanon, White River Junction and Claremont. He would eventually sour on being a landlord, saying the behavior of tenants had come to wear down his patience.
At this time, media accounts began to described him as a developer, although much of his real estate activity steered away from actual building construction. But, there were projects that cleared the way for others to put up structures.
A 21-acre parcel on Route 12-A next to Airport Road would become home to a Sheraton Hotel (now Fireside), LaValley Building Supply, Midas Muffler, Walgreen’s, a strip mall collection of specialty shops, and restaurants. He purchased a parcel in fire-ravaged downtown Lebanon from the city housing authority that eventually sprouted a block of offices, retail space and what is now the Three Tomatoes restaurant.
Another fire-impacted property was the one-time Montshire restaurant on North Main Street in West Lebanon. It had been extensively damaged in the blaze, but Goodwin and his wife and finance officer Dot bought the building and rehabbed it for office space. They cleaned up the equipment within and sold it at auction.
In Hartford, he created the Tall Timbers mobile home park. He bought the landmark Tim True farm on Route 12A with its 300 acres, plus another 300 just over the city line in Plainfield, for what he announced was going to become a 360-unit mobile home park, but it never came to pass. The Lebanon portion is now under conservation easement protection by the state of New Hampshire. He never moved on the Plainfield portion, blaming the town’s restrictive land use regulations.
There would be many more deals all over the Upper Valley over a 20-year period. At one point, he ventured to Wells, Maine, where he started and later abandoned an antique car museum, and to Vero Beach, Florida, where he launched and sold a large mobile home park.
Goodwin was an ardent collector of objects ranging from Model A Fords to vintage crosscut saws, affording him yet another dimension to his life. He built what was named Timber Village along Route 4 in Quechee to house an exhibition of his old-time logging tools and artifacts. He intended it to be a museum but he closed it when it didn’t draw the hoped-for crowds.
Later, under new ownership, it became the Vermont Antique Mall, which now includes some 300 dealer stalls and various retail enterprises and is one of the state’s busiest tourist attractions. An enormous carving of a team of horses hauling a sled load of logs still greets visitors at the driveway entrance.
The Goodwin-inspired Colonial Plaza in West Lebanon still includes shops selling antiques and vintage furnishings. He regularly trekked to the giant Brimfield, Mass., outdoor antiques market in search of rare items to add to his collections and to deal to others.
In the mid-1950s, Goodwin and his brother Otis “Pop” Goodwin were regulars on the Upper Valley jalopy racing scene. The vehicles were vintage Model A Ford coupes fitted with roaring flathead V-8 engines. When a track was planned for a field in Plainfield, townspeople enacted an ordinance that remains on the books today, banning auto racing on weekends anywhere in the town. The site today is part of the Riverview Farm orchard. One jalopy Goodwin was counting on to win failed him, so he hired an excavator to dig a hole and bury the laggard racer.
Goodwin loved most any kind of competition, and he and brother Pop as young men excelled in woodsman contests at fairs around New England in crosscut saw, ax, logrolling and chainsaw races. A skilled hunter and marksman, he regularly harvested large bears and deer.
His passion for hunting would lead to perhaps his most infamous venture, a wild pig hunting park on a 120-acre former dairy farm he bought in Meriden in 1970. He ringed the land with a 12-foot-high wire fence and stocked it with wild hogs transported up from Florida. State Fish and Game authorities were apoplectic, fearing possible escape of the critters that were feral formerly domesticated stock unrelated to the European wild boar found in the nearby Corbin’s Park private game preserve.
Goodwin posted a sign on Route 120 inviting hunters in to shoot wild pigs. But a retired book editor named Maria Millar mounted a full-court press against Goodwin’s plan and rallied residents in opposition. Her key argument was that the town dump lay at the far side of what could be the impact area for the shooters firing at the quarry. One thing Peanie Goodwin couldn’t abide was bad press, and when Millar’s letters started showing up in area newspapers, he abruptly called the whole thing off.
On a chilly November morning, he placed ads on local radio stations inviting listeners to come to the Meriden farm and get a free pig carcass to take home. Corn was tossed over a concrete wall and the pigs raced up to eat it, only to be picked off by marksmen standing atop the wall. The massacre was just getting underway when the state veterinarian, Dr. Clarence Dearborn, drove up. He informed Goodwin of serious liability risk should some of the pigs carry trichinosis, a dreaded infection that could invade humans consuming the meat.
Dr. Dearborn suggested completion of the extermination of the hog herd, with burial in a trench. Thus ended the boar farm venture. Goodwin tore down the fence and carved the farm into 15-20 acre lots, which were auctioned off the following spring at an average of $400 an acre.
It’s important to note that Goodwin expedited the conservation of much Upper Valley land through bargain sales or gifts. Lebanon’s recreational ski area, the Upper Valley Humane Society shelter location in Enfield, the Vic Hewes memorial ballfield in Plainfield, a 500-plus-acre reserve in Hanover and many more locations bear Peanie Goodwin’s fingerprints today.
Steve Taylor of Meriden has been a Valley News contributor for many years.