Located on Old Lemay Ferry Road about 5 miles north of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Hillsboro is a quiet, rural kind of place called Goldman. The area that now has a fire district and not much else is said to have gotten its name from two brothers named Goldman who opened a store sometime in the late 19th century, according to Ruth Welty in Place Names of St. Louis and Jefferson County.
The store had many owners over the years – Reed, Tucker, Frazier, Christopher, Diekman and Wagner – but the Goldman brothers had something perhaps that the others didn’t have, a sign, according to a newspaper article in the News Democrat from June 23, 1949.
“We are told at one time a man named Sam Goldman of St. Louis purchased the store and immediately displayed a prominent sign outdoors reading, ‘Goldman.’ In time, the ownership changed, but the sign remained, until finally Goldman became the accepted name,” the article said.
If Sam Goldman ran the store, Louis Goldman ran the post office. He is listed as the first postmaster of the Goldman Post Office which opened in 1895, according to “Appointments of U.S. Postmasters from 1832-1971 Jefferson, County, Missouri,” from the National Archives.
Before that, the place was called Sandy, said Lily Marsden, who was called “Goldman’s oldest citizen” in the 1949 News Democrat article.
Marsden was born Lily Hensley, July 12, 1863. She was the daughter of Alexander and Virginia Moss Hensley. She said her mother at one time ran the store in Sandy and the post office and the name of Goldman was unknown at that time.
“When the log building was moved to the hill, Mrs. Marsden's mother purchased the store at the present site of Goldman and moved there. The post office was later discontinued. There was a separate log dwelling near the store, but this has disappeared with the years.
The old covered bridge at Goldman has been here as long as she (Lily) remembers,” the article said.
Besides the fire district, the old covered bridge in Goldman, now a state historic site, is just about the only other thing the place is known for, and records show that the area once known as Sandy Mines in 1844 was also known as Sandy Bridge by 1882.
“John H. Morse proposed to span Sandy Creek with a ‘wood covered bridge’ … in 1872. It was built later that year as part of a countywide building program that saw six bridges built to connect the Jefferson County seat of Hillsboro to St. Louis along the Lemay Ferry gravel road,” according to literature on the state’s Sandy Covered Bridge website.
The bridge was destroyed in a spring flood in 1886 and rebuilt.
Marsden said Sandy Creek at the bridge was sometimes used for baptisms, and her husband and a son, Rankie, were both baptized there on the same day, according to the article.
She recalls vividly the day she was baptized in Sandy Creek by the Rev. Sullivan Frazier. "It was winter," mused Aunt Lily, "and the ice had to be cut from the waters."
The log building where her mother operated the store and post office along what is now Old Lemay Ferry Road became Marsden’s home when she married in 1885 and remained her home during her entire married life where she raised her l0 children, six daughters and four sons. She died in 1951 at 87.
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