In 1824, in recognition of his military service during the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette was granted a full township in the Florida Territory by the United States Congress.

The plantation home is now a historic house museum that features original family furniture, porcelain, textiles, glassware, art and personal effects from the era of the First World War.

However, at that time he also controlled some 40 enslaved people who were owned by his mother-in-law, Ann Hawks, who lived with Bryan Croom.

The Leon County Florida 1860 Agricultural Census documented the following for Goodwood Plantation: It is not known why no enslaved people are listed in 1860.

For a short period of time, at Goodwood's greatest extent, in the 1850s when owned by Bryan Hardy Croom, it constituted some 8,000 non-contiguous acres.

Bryan first began living at Rocky Comfort Plantation in Gadsden County, on land the men's father, William, had purchased.

On Saturday, October 7, 1837, Hardy B. Croom and his wife, two daughters, his son and a maternal aunt boarded the packet steamer S.S. Home in New York City bound for Charleston.

The house, whose Italianate design with ornate burgundy railings Hardy may have chosen before his death, was also built by slave labor.

After Frances Hardy's death her relatives, primarily her mother Henrietta Smith, fought what became a landmark court case.

The issues were two; was Hardy a resident of North Carolina at the time of his death or of Florida where his large plantation interests were?

She built an amusement hall, guest cottages, servant quarters, a heated swimming pool, tennis courts and a carriage house.

In 1948 Margret married Thomas Milton Hood, a West Virginia native and Army Air Corps major.

When she died in 1978, Major Hood began planning for the restoration of Goodwood as a house museum and public park.