Westminster (Map, News) - “Julia, you ran a great campaign, but you’re a woman and a woman in Carroll County will never get elected.”

That was what residents told Julia Walsh Gouge two weeks before the primary election in her first run for commissioner.

Two decades and four terms later, Gouge is now the second-longest-serving commissioner in Carroll history.

“I just spent every minute of those last two weeks knocking on every door I could,” Gouge said Monday from her Westminster office.

Gouge’s campaign pamphlet from 1986 lists as platform planks the need for agricultural preservation, industrial development and reservoirs, which Carroll commissioners continue to pursue.

When she was first elected to the Hampstead City Council in 1979, fellow council members said she wouldn’t last six months. “I outstayed all of them,” said Gouge, who became Hampstead’s first female mayor.

A housewife, bank teller and farmer’s daughter, Gouge said she never turned down an opportunity to learn and get involved in her community, whether it was by teaching widows how to manage finances for the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension, planning the Carroll County Agricultural Center or volunteering for the county Economic Development Commission.

But after years of testifying in front of officials for change, Gouge said she wanted to start making changes happen herself. Being a mother and housewife, she said, easily translated into county government, where officials prepare budgets and forge compromises.

Still, doubters abounded.

“I asked them, ‘Can you give me a couple of years to prove myself?’ ”

Gouge was the first commissioner to hold public sessions where residents could raise concerns without an appointment.

Today, open meetings for public comment are a routine part of Gouge’s fifth term.

“I just feel like the more I can do to leave the county as good as it was or improve it, the better,” she said.

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com