John Wood Mansion

In politics as 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, the 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 the 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, at age 65, Colonel John Wood served as commanding officer when the 137th Illinois Infantry Volunteers were mustered into service. 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 the 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 of “The Charitable Aid and Hospital Association of Quincy” on April 18, 1872. He 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.