WOOD, John, pioneer, born in Moravia, Cayuga County, New York, 20 December, 1798; died in Quincy, Illinois, 4: June, 1880. He emigrated to Illinois in 1819, and in 1822 built the first cabin on the site of the present city of Quincy, living in it alone during one winter. In 1825 he secured the laying out of Adams county, of which Quincy is the county-seat. For the succeeding sixty years he was the foremost figure in all matters relating to the city that he founded and made his home. He served as town trustee from 1834 till 1840, was many times alderman, and seven times mayor. In 1850 he was elected to the state senate, where he sat till 1854. In 1856 he was elected lieutenant-governor, and he succeeded to the governorship in 1859. He had enlisted in the Black Hawk war in 1832, and at the beginning of the civil war he was appointed quartermaster-general of Illinois. In 1861 he was sent as a delegate to the Peace conference at Washington, and in 1864 was elected colonel of the 137th Illinois volunteers. Governor Wood was one of the few men who, from the outset, comprehended the scope of the coming struggle. On being questioned by Governor Richard J. Oglesby as to whether a call for 75,000 men for three months' service would be sufficient, he replied: " I know these people, their attachment to slavery, and the deep feeling that actuates them .... They will fight long and desperately. What we want, and want now, and must have, for it will take it all--I know it will--is 500,000 men and $500,000,000." After taking the field, Colonel Wood was placed in command of a brigade at Memphis, where he was stationed at the time of General Nathan B. Forrest's raid on that city. As quartermaster-general he made frequent visits to the armies both in Virginia and in the southwest, giving personal attention to the wants of the various Illinois regiments. He was strongly anti-slavery in sentiment, and more than any one man in northwestern Illinois is said to have contributed to the casting of the vote in that region against the slave-state scheme of the convention of 1824. His townsmen dedicated a monument to his memory on 4 July, 1883.