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Construction on the house began in the early 1830's by Hardy Bryan Croom, eldest son of a wealthy North Carolina planter. The entire Croom family perished off Cape Hatteras when the steamship "Home" in which they were traveling to Florida, was destroyed. The house remained unfinished while relatives of Hardy and his wife Frances fought what became a landmark case all the way to the Supreme Court. It was decided that in all cases where an entire family is destroyed, that the last member of the family assumed alive would inherit, and his heirs would receive the estate. It was assumed that Hardy Croom would have survived the longest and his brother Bryan inherited the majority of the estate including Goodwood, which he finished about 1840.

The house was sold in 1856 to Arvah Hopkins, and the family lived there until the middle 1880s. In 1885 the heirs of Hopkins sold the estate to Dr. William Arrowsmith, surgeon-general to the Italian Garibaldi, who brought with him some of the paintings and furnishings still in the house. In 1911 Mrs. Arrowsmith sold Goodwood to Mrs. Fannie Tiers who remodeled the house to a Mt Vernon style and replaced the wrought iron with Georgian columns. Mrs. Tiers then sold the home to Senator William C. Hodges.