Dr Gouraud Part 1: A Lack of Trust

This is the story of a French physician who was neither French nor a physician. He was a man with a complicated love life, at least three wives, who left a fortune and tangle of legal issues behind when he died in 1878. And his real surname was one of the great ironies of his life: it was Trust.

Joseph William Trust was born in England about 1806. In 1827 he married Eliza Southwell at St. James, Westminster. He told people in New York, decades later, that Eliza "had ran away from him with a play-actor" and that she was "a dancer in one of the theaters." Sometimes he denied having been married in England at all.

Sometime before 1839, Trust moved to New York City and began marketing beauty products under the name Dr. T[rust] Felix Gouraud. As Dr. Gouraud he sold exotically-named items such as Italian Medicated Soap, Liquid Hair Dye, Poudres Subtiles, and of course Gouraud's Oriental Cream.

Trust and his second wife Mary were married in New York in 1839 and had six children. He was enumerated in 1850 under his real name, as an English-born physician living with his wife Mary F. and their surviving children Constance, Andreas, Percy and [Alexander] Volney in the 5th Ward of Manhattan. His shop was located at 67 Walker Street.

Sometime in the late 1850s Gouraud hired a young woman named Martha Hopkins to work in his store. By 1865, Gouraud, Martha and Mary would be in a New York court room, along with a large cast of witnesses, to work out the details of a most scandalous divorce.

Later this week - Dr. Gouraud Part 2: "A Remarkable Divorce Suit"


SOURCES

T.Felix Gouraud information at Hair Raising Stories

Joseph W. Trust household, 1850 US Census, New York City Ward 5, New York, NY; #870/1681, Film # 17113, Image #00235, Ref. #15.

IGI extraction of marriage record: Joseph William Trust marriage to Eliza Southwell, 27 Mar 1827, St. James Westminster, London; link here.

Advertisement from the 1851 Boston Directory, courtesy of Google Books, link here.