Save the Goss Farm: Help Preserve 115 Years of Legacy

Help us honor a remarkable journey that began as a cotton picker on slave plantation, evolving into becoming a cotton farmer on your own land. The Goss Family's farm has stood for over a century, embodying resilience and heritage. Let’s come together to protect this vital piece of history and ensure that future generations can continue the legacy. Your support can make a difference!

Hello, my name is Mike Goss, and I’m reaching out with a heart full of memories, honor, and urgency.

For six generations, my family has lived on this land, experiencing joy and sorrow, hard work and loss, laughter and love. This was long before the internet or cell phones were invented, at a time when less than 1 percent of Black people owned cars and only 7 percent owned land. 

My great-grandfather, Charles Goss, had a dream—most likely considered impossible for a Black man born to previously enslaved parents just one year after General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and announced that slavery ended 3 years earlier. In a time when many Black individuals felt their only path forward was sharecropping, my great-grandfather bravely chose to defy the odds. With unwavering determination and ingenuity, he became part of the proud 7 percent of Black landowners acquiring a 123-acres where he could provide his family, free from the constraints of that one-sided arrangement. Let his inspiring example ignite a fire within us all to boldly pursue our dreams and convert challenges into invaluable stepping stones toward success!

Just a few years removed from slavery, he took on the impossible. On a cold, snowy day on January 1st in 1910, he used his life savings of $100 as a down payment, today’s equivalent of $3,500 on a $600 property and bet big on himself. Big because, earning 25 cents a day, I imagine it felt like a million dollars to him and all those around him.  With his wife, two mules, and six sons one of whom was my grandfather, Elijah, the youngest each armed with a buck saw and a double-bit axe, he set out with a dream still burning bright at the age of 47. A time when most men would have given up, deciding that the pursuit of success was over. Yet this ambitious risk-taker felt he was just getting started and set out to tame a 123-acre wilderness deep in the Piney Woods region of East Texas. 

And in five short, back-breaking, gut-busting years, he finally transformed himself from a cotton picker into a successful cotton farmer-debt free. Unfortunately, he would pass away just 7 years later. Since then, literally thousands can trace their lineage back to this place, which now teeters on the edge of nonexistence. If his legacy is to endure another generation, it will require a massive overhaul after decades of neglect. 

It is in that same spirit as my great-grandfather, at age 67, I have undertaken this herculean task with little more than a dream in my heart. My desire is to honor his legacy and to restore our family farm so that generations of Gosses can experience the place that so many of us once called home.

Why We’re Fundraising

We’ve launched this campaign to raise $85,000 to:

• Reclaim and clear the overgrown farmland

• Restore key infrastructure (fencing, irrigation, buildings)

• Revive sustainable, large-scale agriculture, blending family tradition with commercial farming to serve local needs and global markets.

• Create a community learning space for farming, youth mentorship, and Black land heritage

• Legally secure the land and preserve it as a generational asset

Why It Matters

This isn’t just about acreage. It’s about ancestry.

It’s about one Black man’s impossible dream and the six generations that held it together with calloused hands, weary hearts, and unshakeable love.

Too often, Black land is lost silently, slowly, until there’s nothing left to pass down. But not this time.

With your help, this story doesn’t have to end in silence.

How You Can Help

1. Donate - Every dollar breathes life into this land.

2. Share - Spread this story so the world can feel what we’re fighting for.

3. Stand with us - In preserving Black legacy, dignity, and land.

If this story resonates with you, if you believe that history deserves to be remembered, and that dreams forged through hardship deserve a future, then join us.

Help us preserve the Goss Family Farm as a living testament of love, labor, and legacy.

With deep gratitude,

Mike Goss

Great-grandchild of Charles GossCaretaker of a dream that refuses to die