This extraordinary woman whose intellect and energy took her all over the world was a product of Sidney schools and the University of Illinois Wesleyan University. Early in her career, she felt the call to education, publishing articles and handbooks for teacher education. She became the first female principal of a high school in Ohio and one of the first in the nation when she accepted that position at Sidney High School in the late 1880s after having taught there for eight years. So respected was she nationally that she was appointed the principal of Central High School in Pueblo, Colorado in 1893.
In 1899, after her long-time friend and leading industrialist WHC Goode became a widower, he traveled to Colorado to ask Ida to marry him and help him raise his five children. That began the next phase of her life at the age of 41 raising the five children and managing Whitby Place, now Great Stone Castle. She and her husband ran the American Steel Scraper Company, their many farms in Ohio, a 2000-acre wheat farm in North Dakota, a large cattle ranch in Texas where oil was discovered, and a plantation in Mississippi. They also built 50 houses here in Sidney.
After her marriage of twenty-four years ended in Goode’s sudden death in 1923, for the next six years, Ida was the operational manager of the American Steel Scraper Co.
Then began the next phase of her life at the age of 60 when she started the first of her many travels to establish schools in far- flung places.
Her lifelong devotion to the Methodist Church and her intellect and organizational skills led her to be elected the national president of the Women’s Home Missionary Society. She served in that capacity from 1926-1947, travelling throughout the Western Hemisphere furthering education. Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, and even the West Indies became familiar to her as she supervised mission activities, particularly the establishment and growth of schools. As a result, mission schools in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, Kentucky, and North Carolina today bear her name.
Her work garnered her many honors, but the most special to her was the doctorate of letters from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a school focused on the education of disadvantaged black women. Elected to their board of trustees, Ida supervised the growth of that school from an enrollment of 10 to more than 300 by 1940 despite the prevailing discrimination and WWII. Another achievement was the Robinson School in Puerto Rico, which was finished in 1946 with its main building named Ida Haslup Goode Hall. By then Ida was 88 years old! Towards the end of her life, Ida was still active during the remodeling of her beloved Methodist Church in Sidney. She designed and paid for the creation of the beautiful central sanctuary window depicting Christ surrounded by children of different races. Just a month before she would have turned 100, this remarkable woman died in 1958, but not before leaving a legacy of service not soon to be matched.