Not named for the folks behind La Cañada’s legendary “Gould Castle” but for Will Daniel Gould (1845-1926), a prominent Los Angeles attorney who once owned over a thousand acres at the top of this street (named by 1923). Gould was born and raised in Cabot, VT. After attending the University of Michigan, he passed the bar in 1871 and set up practice in L.A. the following year. He married Mary Louise Hait, a transplant from Katonah, NY, in 1875; records vary widely, but it appears she was at least twelve years his senior. Both fervent Prohibitionists, they had no children, and Mary’s death came a year after Will’s. The Goulds established their ranch here sometime before 1883, when a book called A Southern California Paradise cited it as a “summer resort” called, rather confusingly, “Highland Park”. But the couple’s primary home was first in DTLA and later on Baxter Street in Silver Lake. They would eventually donate loads of land in what is now called Gould Mesa.
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