Where did you find a font with that name? Or do you have an image to post or point to?

Try looking for the term "grotesk" or "grotesque" instead, that may come up with what you're looking for better.

Did you mean "plain gothic" just as a description, then (rather than a specifid font name)? Your sample has almost no distinguishing characteristics. Except for the apostrophe , it matches any number of contemporary digital fonts, such as Akzidenz Grotesk, Red Rooster's Block Gothic, Monopol, Plakette, and others. If you're looking for history, you might as well investigate the general history of sans serif type. That's about a third of the many tens of thousands of typefaces out there.

Plain Gothic is the name of the typeface. This is for research for a letterpress project. I guess I'll check out sans serif type's history and see what comes up