John Wood was born December 20, 1798, in Sempronius (a portion of which later became Moravia), Cayuga County, New York, the second child of Daniel and Katherine Crouse Wood.

Wood’s father, who could speak several foreign languages fluently, was a surgeon in the Revolutionary War, assigned to George Washington’s headquarters.  Wood had one sister, Clarissa, who would be a frequent visitor to Wood’s Quincy homes.  Wood’s mother became estranged from the family when John was five.  The boy was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, James  and Mary Armstrong Wood, in Florida, New York. 

When 20 years old, Wood, on November 2, 1818, departed for the Upper Ohio Valley.  During a winter’s stay in Cincinnati, he decided to go west instead.  In 1818, Edmond Dana, federal surveyor of the 3.5-million-acre Illinois Military Tract between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, published two books describing the attractions in Illinois.  In one he claimed the land that Wood was to develop as Quincy was the best he had surveyed.  After journeying on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Wood reached Edwardsville, Illinois.  At the federal land office he met Willard Keyes, who had taught French and Indian children in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, before traveling down the Mississippi in 1819.  Like Wood, Keyes was disappointed that he had accumulated so little in two years.  Wood and Keyes formed a partnership to explore and invest in land in the Military Tract. 

Wood and Keyes squatted on land in Pike County, Illinois, in 1820; built a rustic cabin; and planted and harvested three crops.  (Squatters occupied land they did not own, one reason Wood and Keyes built only a primitive cabin.)

With Keyes, Wood arrived in 1822 at “the Bluffs,” a limestone formation that rose nearly 100 feet above the Mississippi River, which Keyes had seen while rafting south. 

Wood and Jeremiah Rose, a third Quincy founder, built a log cabin at the foot of today’s Delaware Street.  Rose, his wife, and their five-year-old daughter lived with Wood in the cabin until 1826.

Wood’s cabin served as the first post office in the area. It also was the site of the first Christmas party in 1822.  About a dozen guests ate venison, bear, wild turkey, and honey.  Wood provided whiskey . . . and the guests stayed all night.

In November 1822, Wood bought 160 acres in the Military Tract from Peter Flyn.  Wood was a hard-bargaining, patient businessman.   Flyn, who had asked $120, refused Wood’s offer in 1821.  With no other takers, however, Flyn settled for Wood’s offer of $100 the next year, less than what he had paid for it.

Wood joined Governor Edward Coles in fighting the Illinois legislature’s attempt in 1823-24 to rewrite the state constitution in order to make Illinois a slave state.  Wood was an effective anti-slavery campaigner.  Voters in the area of the Military Tract in which he campaigned against a slave-state Illinois defeated the proposal by a 9-to-1 ratio.  The ratio was 6 to 4 statewide.  Wood considered his part in the fight against slavery his life’s greatest accomplishment.

Wood married Ann Marie Streeter in Quincy on January 25, 1826.  His friend Willard Keyes, Adams County commissioner, performed the wedding.  Wood’s wedding gift to Streeter was a pair of white calfskin slippers, which he bought in Palmyra, Missouri, the day before the wedding. 

The couple had eight children:  Ann (1827-1905), Daniel (1829-1922), John Jr. (1830-1889), Emily (1833-1835), Adah (1835-1844), Joshua (1837-1910), Henry (1839-1842), and James (1842-1850).

Wood and his wife moved to Galena, Illinois, to seek their fortune during the rush to the lead mines in the northwest corner of the state in 1827.

Wood volunteered for service in the state militia in the Black Hawk War in 1832. He served in the same regiment as Abraham Lincoln of New Salem, Orville Hickman Browning of Quincy, and Robert Anderson, commanding officer at Ft. Sumter at the beginning of the Civil War.

The Wood family outgrew their second log cabin, a two-story structure near the northwest corner of Burton and Wood Roads, today’s State and 12th Streets.  Wood in 1835 began construction of a two-story Greek Revival mansion facing south on State Street between 11th and 12th Streets. He moved his family into the 14-room home in 1837 and completed it in 1838.

The first anti-slavery society in Illinois was established in Adams County in 1835. The original charter and constitution, signed by dozens of notable Adams County residents, is in the archives of the Historical Society.

Opposed to slavery, John Wood and a number of other leading citizens of Quincy defended the abolitionists’ right to freedom of speech, even gathering arms and placing them under the pulpit of the Lord’s Barn, Quincy’s first church, for defensive use.  When an anti-abolitionist mob threatened to break up a meeting of abolitionists at the church, Wood and other church guardians scattered the attacking crowd.  

In the winter of 1838-39 Wood helped organize a countywide effort to shelter 5,700 members of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s Mormon Church after Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered them out of the state under a threat of death.  It was one of the nation’s greatest humanitarian efforts.

Wood was elected to eight one-year terms as mayor of Quincy.  He served in years 1844, ‘45, ‘46, ‘47, ‘48, ’52, ‘53 and ’56.

In 1846, Wood provided the City of Quincy with 40 acres of land overlooking the Mississippi River to create Woodland Cemetery.  He served as the cemetery’s sexton (caretaker) for the remainder of his life.  He donated five more acres on the south side of the cemetery within the next few years.  In 1860, Wood had the body of his father Daniel, a Revolutionary War doctor who had served on the staff of George Washington at Valley Forge, exhumed and reinterred at Woodland Cemetery.  John Wood, members of his family, and several descendants are also buried there.

Wood worked to broker a truce between the Mormons at Nauvoo and anti-Mormon militia and neighbors.  He then led the effort of Quincyans to provide aid materials to the refugees leaving Nauvoo for the Salt Lake Valley.

With sons Daniel and John, Jr., Wood joined the gold rush to California in 1848.  Unsuccessful in the venture, the Wood men return to Quincy the next year.

In 1848 Wood donated a lot at Ninth and State for construction of a small brick church, 36 x 48 feet, which when dedicated was named “Salem.”

In politics a Whig, Wood was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1850.  He resigned from the post under duress when residents of his own Adams County were critical of his vote to locate a railroad in the other county in his district, Pike County.  He did not seek to be returned to his Senate seat.

In 1856 the newly created Illinois Republican Party made Wood its candidate for lieutenant governor. Wood was actually the party’s second choice.  Alton’s Francis Hoffman, whom the party had slated to appeal to the state’s German voters, was removed from the ticket when it was learned he did not meet the residency requirement.  Wood, also well known as a friend of German immigrants, replaced Hoffman and was elected lieutenant governor on the state’s first Republican ticket in 1856. Wood’s political friend Abraham Lincoln chaired the Republican committee that nominated Wood for the statewide executive post.

When the new Republican Governor William H. Bissell and his family moved into the magnificent, new governor’s mansion in Springfield, Wood started building a larger home in Quincy.  His stone eight-sided mansion was located on the property where he had built the family's two-story log cabin in 1826 and their Greek Revival mansion in 1835.  Wood’s architect was John VanOsdel who had designed the executive mansion in Springfield in 1855.  He told the architect he wanted a home “bigger than Bissell’s.”  His octagonal mansion was the most expensive home in Illinois at that time.

To build the octagonal house, Wood moved his Greek Revival mansion to his apple orchard one block east.  He split the Greek Revival home at its midpoint and moved half of the house at a time to its location today.  A naturalist, Wood preserved a stand of Osage orange trees by having a ramp built over them.  Twenty teams of horses pulled each half of the house up the ramp and over the row of Osage orange trees.  Wood had the axis of the house shifted 90 degrees clockwise so that the pedimented, columned front faced the country’s emerging west.

Wood became Illinois’ 12th governor when William Harrison Bissell died in office on March 18, 1860.  Wood served until January 14, 1861.

Wood’s Greek Revival Mansion at 12th and State became the official governor’s mansion after the Illinois legislature (acting on Wood’s request) permitted him to remain in Quincy during his tenure as governor. Closing in a porch, he conducted state business from an office on the south side of the house.

Wood allowed Abraham Lincoln to conduct his 1860 presidential campaign from the governor’s office Wood left vacant in the Illinois state house in Springfield.  Wood also permitted Governor Bissell’s widow to remain in the new governor’s mansion there.

In Springfield on August 8, 1860, Wood was elected president of a huge rally for Abraham Lincoln, dark horse Republican candidate for the presidency.

The near-victory of first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, in 1856 was clear evidence that the South could no longer control the national government.  It convinced Governor Wood that rumors the South would secede from the union were credible.  Consequently, Governor Wood reorganized the state militia, which had been neglected by governors since the Mexican War’s end two decades earlier.  Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune reported that, as a result, Illinois was among states best prepared to send volunteers at the start of the Civil War, when President Lincoln called on the states to supply 75,000 men.

Business interests in Quincy led Wood to decline requests that he seek re-election as governor. 

Wood in 1861 established John Wood & Co., Bankers and Exchange Dealers, at the southeast corner of Fifth and Maine Streets.  He sold the bank in 1864 to employee Henry F. J. Ricker.

Governor Richard Yates, a Jacksonville friend and fellow Republican, appointed Wood one of five Illinois delegates to the “Peace Congress.”  Meeting in Washington, D.C., the effort failed to avert secession of southern states.  Wood and his Illinois colleagues established a campaign for states to back bonding to provide funding for the war effort, when a few other delegations threatened to halt federal funding in an effort to stop the war.

In another appointment by Governor Yates, Wood served as Illinois Quartermaster General during the Civil War. Yates knew that Wood’s earlier reorganization of the state militia made him best prepared for the post.

Ann Streeter Wood, Wood’s wife of 37 years, died in 1863.

On June 4, 1864, Col. John Wood, 65, as commanding officer mustered men into the 137th Illinois Infantry Volunteers.  Wood and his regiment were sent to serve as pickets along Hidalgo Road, south of Memphis.  Their unit was attacked by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forest.  The men of Wood’s 100-day infantry unit were discharged on September 4, 1864.

Widower Wood married Mary Ann Brown Holmes, widow of the Rev. Joseph Holmes of Quincy, in 1865.  The Octagonal Mansion was completed and Wood’s eldest son Daniel acquired the governor’s Greek Revival house.

A passenger on a steamboat that sank along Southern California coast during a trip in 1870, Wood declined an order to board a lifeboat.  “Send the young folks first,” he is said to have responded.  “I am 70 years old.  Save the young.”

A humanitarian, Wood was among the founders on April 18, 1872, of “The Charitable Aid and Hospital Association of Quincy” and was elected president in 1877.  The institution provided “relief and support to sick, destitute and dependent persons,” as well as hospital and infirmary care.

Financial reversals, part of the continuing effect of the “Panic of 1873,” forced Wood in 1876 to sell his octagonal stone mansion for $40,000, a significant loss.  Broke, Wood and his wife moved into the Greek Revival mansion with son Daniel and his family.

John Wood died in the Mansion on June 4, 1880.  He was 81.  The Quincy community memorialized him with great honors and tributes.  The governor’s body, 16 pallbearers alongside, was borne past thousands of mourners who lined the streets of the city he had founded more than a half century earlier. 

Governor John Wood was buried in a plot he had reserved for his family at the center of his Woodland Cemetery.   Wood left it to others to judge his life’s achievements.  He asked that his gravestone be small.  A man who had accumulated great wealth and saw it dissipate during a national financial panic, Citizen Wood asked for a simple engraving on his tombstone:  an etching of his life’s first possession, the one-room log cabin he and Jeremiah Rose built in 1822. 

As he wished, Wood was buried beneath a white oak tree at the cemetery’s highest point on the limestone bluff above the Mississippi.