Nathan Goff Jr. was one of the most consequential West Virginia politicians of the late nineteenth century. He was born in Clarksburg in 1843, served as a Union officer during the Civil War (he was captured at the Battle of Moorefield in January 1864 and imprisoned in Richmond's Libby Prison), studied law after the war, and entered politics as a Republican. He served as U.S. Attorney for the District of West Virginia under President Grant in the 1870s, then as Secretary of the Navy briefly under President Hayes in 1881 - one of the shortest-tenured cabinet officers in American history. He returned to West Virginia politics, served three terms in the U.S. House from 1883 to 1889, became a federal appellate judge in 1892, and finally - after resigning from the bench - served in the U.S. Senate from 1913 to 1919. Few American political careers spanned cabinet, House, federal judiciary, and Senate. Goff's did.

The house's other senatorial occupant was Nathan's son Guy Despard Goff, born in 1866 - the year after Lincoln's death and the immediate post-Civil War remaking of American politics. Guy Goff graduated from Kenyon College and took his law degree from Harvard, then practiced law in Milwaukee for many years, and served as Assistant Attorney General of the United States during the Wilson administration. He returned to West Virginia and was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1924, serving one term until 1931. He died in 1933. The Goff family's combination of two senators - father and son, both elected from the same state - is uncommon enough to merit attention, and the family produced additional public figures across multiple generations, including the senator's daughter Louise, who married Walter Edge, the governor of New Jersey and U.S. ambassador to France. The Goff family represented, more than almost any other West Virginia political family, the upper layer of the Republican establishment in the state's first century.

The house was built between 1880 and 1883 - during a period when Nathan Goff Jr. was a federal prosecutor and his political profile was rising sharply. It was a substantial three-story brick mansion. The architecture combined two dominant styles of the late Victorian era: Queen Anne, with its asymmetrical massing, varied window shapes, and ornamented surfaces; and Second Empire, with its characteristic mansard roof clad in slate. The mansard roof was the defining feature - a steeply pitched, dormer-windowed third story that signaled French architectural sophistication to passers-by. The house occupied a prominent corner site in what is now part of the Clarksburg Downtown Historic District, and for its first several decades it was one of the most architecturally distinguished private residences in West Virginia, a visible symbol of the Goff family's political and economic standing.

After Guy Goff's death in 1933 the house passed out of family ownership. Through much of the mid-twentieth century it was used as professional offices and, briefly, as a small apartment building. The maintenance demands of a complex Victorian-era brick structure with a slate mansard roof were considerable, and by the 1970s the property was in serious decline. The 1976 National Register listing - the historic preservation movement's most powerful federal recognition - was prompted partly by recognition that the house was at risk. The listing made the property eligible for federal rehabilitation tax credits and provided a measure of protection against federal-funded demolition projects. It did not, however, protect against simple private decisions to tear the house down. By the late 1980s the property's owners had concluded that rehabilitation was financially impossible and that the land was more valuable cleared than built upon. The house was demolished in 1993. The National Register formally delisted it the following year - an unusual procedure but the only recourse when a listed property no longer exists.

The loss of the Nathan Goff Jr. House is sometimes cited in historic preservation literature as a case study in the limits of the National Register. The listing provided incentives for rehabilitation but no actual prohibition against demolition; the federal protections that apply to listed properties are real but narrow; ultimately, the survival of a historic building depends on local will, owner intent, and economic feasibility. In the case of the Goff House, all three failed at roughly the same time. The site is now a parking lot. The Clarksburg Downtown Historic District continues to protect its remaining 119 buildings, but the loss of the Goff House remains one of the most visible reminders in the district of what was once there - a three-story brick mansion that housed two U.S. senators across half a century and that no one, in the end, was able to save.