Florida Fallen Stories

When reporting the death of Harold Gould on September 4, 1918, The DeLand News remarked that, although the 33-year-old had lived most of his life in DeLand, he was “of a roving disposition” and had traveled a great deal before dying in defense of his country.

Born in DeLand on September 1, 1886, Harold was the youngest of five children (three of whom survived childhood) of Gardner Dyer Gould (1837-1892) and Mary Elizabeth Mead (1847-1936), both natives of New York. His father was a whaler based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and then a tailor in Syracuse, New York, who enlisted in a New York Light Artillery regiment in 1864, participating in the operations against Fort Wagner and the reduction of the fortifications of Charleston harbor, before mustering out in July 1865 as a sergeant. After working as a grocer and dry goods salesman in Saginaw, Michigan, and a wholesale fruit dealer in St. Paul, Minnesota, he relocated with his wife and two children, Vincent Ward Gould, age fifteen, and Edith Grace Gould, ten years old, to DeLand, Florida in 1885. Three years later he purchased the Putnam Inn, a three-story wooden structure with 85 rooms, surrounded by ten acres of orange trees, which he managed until his death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After his father died, Ward Gould took over managing the Putnam Inn, which remained in his family’s hands until 1906. The next year, he founded an insurance company, which remains in business today. A pioneer real estate developer, he was a member of the city council, chairman for fourteen years of the Volusia County School Board, and director of the First National Bank. One of his sons was Frank Gardner Gould (1907-2004), a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.

 

 

Harold’s sister, Grace, earned her doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy in 1910 and was active in the Florida Osteopathic Association, serving as secretary-treasurer while living in Jacksonville. She formed a partnership with Dr. Samuel Robert Love (1873-1955), a pioneer osteopathic physician, and opened a practice on Pine Street in DeLand. In 1915, she married David Hayes Agnew Irwin (1889-1978), originally from Camden, New Jersey, a dentist and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania Dental School. In June 1917, when he registered for the draft, Agnew, and Grace Irwin, resided in Maple Shade, New Jersey, about 12 miles due east of Philadelphia. The following year Agnew was a first lieutenant serving in the U.S. Army Dental Corps in France.

 

 

 

Harold Gould attended public schools in DeLand and graduated from the DeLand Business College in 1903. For a while he worked with his brother Ward in his insurance firm when it was known as Gould Brothers.

 

 

But apparently he wanted to do more with his life, so he joined the Marines, enlisting at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, Washington, on June 23, 1909. Harold Gould spent the next four years stationed mostly at the Marine Barracks at Puget Sound. From September 1909 through May 1910, he was sick in the base hospital, for reasons unknown. In December 1909 he was assigned to ship duty on the cruiser USS Philadelphia. In May 1911 he was promoted to corporal, but on March 5, 1912, he was reduced in rank to private at his own request. On November 15, 1911, he was tried for being intoxicated and unfit for duty. Found guilty, he was fined $14, a month’s pay. On March 31, 1912, guilty of a second offense, this time being under the influence in his quarters, he was placed in confinement for ten days and fined $1 per day. His enlistment term nearly expired after four years of service, on June 20, 1913, Private Gould was discharged, with the comment: “Character: Very Good.”

Out of uniform, Harold Gould’s “roving disposition” appeared again. By September 1913 he returned home, working for his brother and his business partner in their insurance and real estate firm named Gould-Wootten. But soon he headed for New York City for a while, before accepting a position as bookkeeper at the First National Bank of DeLand in February 1915.  Then he decided that he would follow in his sister’s footsteps and attend the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy. Living with Grace and her husband in Maple Shade, he began taking courses.

While a student, he enlisted in Company K, 1st Pennsylvania Infantry on June 23, 1916. Earlier that month, Mexican revolutionary commander Francisco “Pancho” Villa had crossed the border and raided several U.S. towns, including Columbus, New Mexico, and Boquilla, Texas.

In response, President Woodrow Wilson issued a call to the governors to mobilize the entire National Guard. Responding to Wilson’s emergency call-up, Pennsylvania Governor Martin G. Brumbaugh authorized the Pennsylvania National Guard (PNG) to mobilize. Ex-Marine Harold Gould volunteered his services, reporting at Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania on June 23. A week later he had passed a physical exam, received inoculations for smallpox and typhoid, and was mustered into federal service. He and his company arrived in El Paso and set up camp by July 25. The troops participated in marches, artillery practice, and maneuvers along the border. Promoted to Private First Class on September 1, 1916, he was mustered out on October 23 and returned home.  The DeLand News of November 1, 1916, initially reported that he had secured a job with Alexander & Baird, a citrus packing house in nearby Beresford, Florida. The same newspaper announced on March 16, 1917, that Harold Gould had left for Philadelphia to resume his studies in osteopathy. But then the war came.

 

 

Less than a week before President Wilson asked a special joint session of the United States Congress for a declaration of war against the German Empire on April 2, 1917, Harold Gould rejoined the 1st PNG Infantry at Philadelphia. On May 17, he was promoted to Corporal. On August 5 he was once again drafted into Federal service. By the end of the month, his unit, made up of men mostly from the 1st Pennsylvania based in Philadelphia or the 13th Pennsylvania from Scranton, was now designated as 109th U.S. Infantry, and brigaded with the 110th Infantry and the 108th Machine Gun Battalion, to form the 55th Infantry Brigade of the 28th (Keystone) Division, headquartered at Camp Hancock, near Augusta, Georgia. Here, on September 7, 1917, he was promoted to Sergeant. Although men from other states were trained at Hancock early during the war, the vast majority were former PNG members like Gould, including Company K’s commanding officer, Capt. William Lincoln Rountree (1866-1946), a Philadelphia undertaker, who had served in the PNG since 1889 and had commanded at El Paso during the Mexican Border service in 1916.

 

 

 

 

 

Living in tents at Camp Hancock and training up to eight hours a day apparently suited Harold Gould, and he evidently impressed his superiors with his leadership abilities. On January 2, 1918, he was one of 482 selected, out of more than 1,600 applicants, for the divisional Third Officers’ Training Camp. The fifteen-week course included two hours a day of intensive study of the Infantry Drill and Field Service regulations, as well as daily marches or hikes, bayonet and musketry practice, signaling, gas mask training, physical fitness and recreational activities, and lectures on military courtesies, articles of war, and military discipline and punishment.  Officer candidates were also subjected to psychological tests, physical examinations, and constant enjoinders to avoid swearing and to abstain from alcohol. Sergeant Gould completed the course, but he was not among the 70 top graduates who were commissioned second lieutenants on April 20. Instead, he was among 280 others who were ordered back to their respective units to await commissioning as vacancies occurred. By the end of the month, he had left Camp Hancock and was aboard the USS Finland on his way to France.

 

 

 

A little more than three months after arriving in France, on the afternoon of July 16, 1918, Sergeant Gould was killed in action during an operation known as the Champagne-Marne defensive, near Saint-Agnan. Howard F. Culley, a corporal from Scranton who had served in the same company as Gould since the Mexican border days, told what happened:

Our company had just started a smashing drive against the Germans. For three days we had been tucked away in the woods and they had given good protection. But we were now out of the woods and everyone was happy. As we advanced we were subjected to a terrific machine-gun fire and shelling, but not a backward step was taken…. We kept going ahead and when a man fell somebody would assist him to the rear….

Culley continued:

A half hour after we started forward Sergeant Harold Gould, of Philadelphia, had forged way ahead of the boys and was doing wonderful work with his rifle. Now that I have had time to reflect upon the fight, I think Gould’s performance will go down in the company’s records as the most daring in its history. He kept crawling ahead until he reached a bunch of Germans and, through his superb courage and coolness, took them prisoner. As he was disarming them, a sniper ended his life. As we crawled toward him, we saw him throw up his hands and roll over. I understand that the bullet went through his head.

Gould was “the bravest man in our company,” according to Corporal Culley, who was wounded in his left arm and would be awarded the French Croix de Guerre for his actions in capturing a machine gun nest.

 

 

Gould’s company commander, Capt. Edward Troutman Miller (1890-1981), who had replaced Captain Rountree in February 1918 when he retired on disability, wrote that Sergeant Gould showed “unusual valor and heroism while under the most severe machine gun and artillery fire…. He gave up his life willingly, cheerfully for the cause of his country.”

 

 

Another of Gould’s Company K comrades, Sgt. William S. Gannon, who was severely wounded in the left hip and thigh on July 16, later wrote Grace Gould Irwin about her brother’s death. Gannon was in a different section, about one hundred yards to Gould’s left, and therefore did not see him fall.  But Gannon in fact did know that Gould was among the casualties, and he was buried in the woods after the fighting. “I can say,” Gannon told Dr. Gould, that your brother “carried out his duties until the end.” One of the men of K Company, who was near him at the time, said that Gould “died with a smile and good wishes to the men.” He was, in Gannon’s opinion, “a great leader and soldier” and a “valuable man to all of us.” Gannon added: “Harold’s commission to Lieutenancy arrived after he was buried.”

News of Harold Gould’s death was slow in reaching DeLand. It was not until early September that his name was included among the fallen in local newspapers. The DeLand News first reported his death on September 4, noting that he was the second native son who died in the war, four days before Sgt. Paul L. Hon, who was KIA on July 20. A memorial service was held for Gould at the First Methodist Church of DeLand on Sunday, September 8. And a couple of days later The DeLand News published a resolution of appreciation by the Volusia County Board of Education for “Lieutenant” Harold Gould’s “heroic sacrifice,” in honor of his brother Ward, who served as chairman.

 

 

Harold Gould was initially buried near where he fell and reburied on November 17, 1918, in Grave 20 American Battle Area Cemetery in Saint-Agnan, France. On June 5, 1919, his remains were disinterred and reburied in Grave 42, Section D, Plot 2 of the American Cemetery #608 at Seringes-et-Nesles, Aisne. Disinterred and reburied again on April 8, 1921, seven years later his grave was renumbered and rearranged in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, his final resting place. Harold Gould’s “roving disposition” finally had ceased.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1920, when John Powers Dullard (1862-1957), the director of the New Jersey State Library War History Bureau, contacted Harold Gould’s mother in DeLand, requesting a photograph of her son for a planned Gold Star Memorial volume, she replied candidly: “I don’t know if my precious boy would belong in the New Jersey War History, as he was in a Pennsylvania Regiment (109^th Inf.).” He gave his residence as Maple Shade [New Jersey],” she explained, because he was visiting his sister at the time of enlistment. Sending the photograph anyway, she wrote: “But he really was a Florida boy.”

Despite this fact, Harold Eugene Gould’s name was not included on the Memorial Scroll.