Nancy Gooch (c. 1811 – September 17, 1901) was an early African American settler in California and one of the state's most successful 19th-century black female landowners.
Gooch gained her freedom when California entered the Union as a free state in 1850.
Nancy Gooch was born an enslaved person in Maryland in about 1811 (although it varies based on the census year, her gravestone says 1811).
[1] However, left behind was Gooch's three-year-old son Andrew, who later on was purchased by a Missouri family named Monroe.
But, Nancy kept working, and while by the time she had amassed the seven hundred dollars needed, slavery had been abolished, she was still able to pay for her son's family to move to California in 1868, and continue to cultivate the land she had bought with her husband.