North Country’s Finest: Discovering The Past

Nicholas Goodall could play any music if he heard it just once.

A violin prodigy who toured the country as a child, Goodall was known as the “mad fiddler.”

He died in his early 30s in the Jefferson County poorhouse in Watertown in 1881.

Now a city woman is out to restore not only Goodall’s reputation, but his final resting place.

Kathy Plante-Hunt has worked to restore Watertown’s Arsenal Street Cemetery.

Along the way, she has found Goodall’s neglected and long forgotten headstone.

“I was so elated. It was like finding the blue diamond in the rough. I was so happy,” she said.

The marker was set upright and cleaned.

It’s unclear how Goodall came to reside Watertown.

His father was also a violinist; he happened to be in the orchestra at Ford’s Theater in Washington on the night that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

See Mike Boyce’s report:

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