Born 1860 JWG was born in Europe to a scientific family. He learned some neat chemical tricks from his scientific family at the Bayer Lab in Germany. They became insanely rich when they marketed aspirin, but they weren't happy with the way they were being treated in Germany. The family decided to send John to America with the chemical formula for basic polyurethane, which they used as a glue for shoe soles. Now this is before polyurethane was patented.

Polyurethane wasn't John's only formula, because he could also make plastics, but everything was kept a secret in their lab notes, because of the arch way they were being treated in Germany, with pushy unwelcome lab observers and catwalks over the lab so they couldn't have any privacy. John's family insisted animal experiments be done on aspirin before it was released to the public because they were concerned about the bleeding side effects. These young new lab partners brought in dogs which they allowed to run free in the lab, pissing on the table legs. You can see this in a photo from the Bayer Lab. You will also see in this photo John in his teens.

Anyway, they trained John to speak English along with German and French. Then they sent him to America where he was adopted by the Goodsell family in Olean, NY. There he learned how to run a shoe sole leather factory. Some tanners in West Virginia who were of German descent, found out about John and their plans. They offered to help.


John told his relatives that a shoe sole operation was much more complicated than just running a factory. You have to also tan the leather. To tan the leather, you need the tannin contained in tree bark. Many trees were being cut down at that time and stripped just for the bark, which was a waste of good wood, so JWG recommended that a timber operation also be put into place in conjunction with the leather factory. Many different people would have to be involved.

Well, if they were going to sell timber too, why not also sell scrub wood to a paper factory. The Goodsell family of Associated Press wanted this additional factory. Thus the "skunk works" were born. Paper was needed for newspapers.

JWG traveled all over the country, building leather factories until he discovered West Virginia. He fell in love with the area. There the virgin forests had large trees 15 feet around on steep hills and plenty of rivers to carry the timber to processing plants. Trees with high tannin content in their bark were numerous in West Virginia. The steep hills were very thinly populated so buying large tracts of land to timber was easier.


This photo of a West Virginia factory was published in "Tumult on the Mountains: Lumbering in West Virginia 1770-1920"

John wrote home about beautiful West Virginia. He didn't feel comfortable running such a hugh operation himself because of his English skills, so he got a boatload of money from his Bayer family to finance a bank which he built in West Virginia.

John Wesley loaned money to various people to build tanneries, to buy up land that they could timber, and build all the processing plants for tannin and saw mills. He also managed one tannery, Pocahontas Tanning, where he could use his special secret glue with a polyurethane base for making durable thick shoe soles. Pocahontas was financed to the sum of one million one hundred thousand dollars in 1917.

John liked the name because he claimed to be kin to the princess, Pocahontas. He used to endear himself to the children of his employees by handing out old Indianhead pennies. The design for the penney was made into gold coins, which were produced after his death in 1931 with the feathers cut off in the art so you would think of West Virginia, (WVWVWVWVWVWV).

Now if you go to a thrift shop or an antique store and look at the soles of old shoes. You will immediately see the difference JWG's special formula made in the manufacturing of shoe soles. Shoe sole leather was friable (you could easily tear off bits of leather so the old leather wasn't very durable) and the soles often were very thin because they couldn't reliably build up layers of leather to make thick soles. The soles of old children's shoes were thin like moccasins. They were not water resistant.

JFG's formula made leather soles so much better than other factories that the factory John managed became the foremost producer of leather soles in the US. Jealous owners who had been put out of business by his factory, were eager to find out his special formula. John Wesley Goodsell became famous in an odd sort of way. First the family and associates became the inspiration for Al Capp's newspaper cartoon, Lil Abner. Maybe you will recognize John's resemblance to the patriarch of the Beverly Hill Billies.