Alice Katherine Gould– Smiths Falls — Gould Family

Alice Kathyrn Gould played a central role in this area. Descended from Jason Gould, Alice Gould wrote her history and historical poetry with a great deal of personal empathy for the early settlers .

The background upon which these settlers moved was heroic, dangerous, and in Gould’s mind probably much more interesting than Smiths Falls of the twentieth century.
This emerged clearly through Gould’s first historical essay of Smiths Falls , “Out of the Wilderness” published in the 1925 Old Home Week Souvenir Programme.

With strong influences from Loyalist history , Gould viewed the founders of Smiths Falls as larger than life , whose achievement must be equalled by the present generation if the town was to prosper. On viewing the construction of the new filtration plant on an old mill site , Gould connected the history of the town with it s present vitality .

By the Rideau: A Tale of Smiths Falls in Song and Story–In her 1939 publication
By the Rideau: A Tale of Smiths Falls in Song and Story, the Rideau Canal and its builders received a prominent place. The written history largely followed the 1925 version with some amplifications. Her poetry, however, reinforced the romanticized view of the early settlers.

James Simpson’s description of making the roads out from Smiths Falls was taken from it. She also told that James Simpson had left Smiths Falls in 1832, selling out his interests to his brother Wm. Simpson.

James eventually went to the California gold rush in 1849, and “returning on a visit to relatives in Smiths Falls in June 1852 on the steamship “Independence” bound from San Francisco to San Juan del Sur, he died aboard ship, and agreeable to his request, was buried at sea, near Acapulco, Mexico. In his will, dictated to the purser, he made disposal of his effects, which included two bags of gold dust valued at five thousand, six hundred dollars”