John Taylor Wood

John Taylor Wood (August 13, 1830 – July 19, 1904) was an officer in the United States Navy and the Confederate Navy. He resigned from the U.S. Navy at the beginning of the American Civil War, and became a "leading Confederate naval hero" as a captain in the Confederate Navy. He was a lieutenant serving aboard when it engaged in 1862, one of the most famous naval battles in Civil War and U.S. Naval history. He was caught in 1865 in Georgia with Confederate President Jefferson Davis' party, but escaped and made his way to Cuba. From there, he got to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he settled and became a merchant. His wife and children joined him there, and more children were born in Canada, which is where he lived out the remainder of his life. Early life John Taylor Wood was the son and first child of Robert Crooke Wood from Rhode Island, an army surgeon, and Ann Mackall Taylor, eldest daughter of Zachary Taylor, (who would become a major general in the United States Army, a hero of the Mexican–American War, and who would serve as 12th president of the United States, 1849–1850). Robert Crooke Wood and Zachary Taylor served together in the U.S. Army. Along with being the grandson of a U.S. president, John Taylor Wood was also the nephew of future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, whose first wife, Sarah Knox Taylor (1814–1835), was the second daughter of Zachary Taylor and Margaret Mackall Smith. Wood was born on August 13, 1830, at Fort Snelling then in the Northwest Territory near present-day St. Paul, Minnesota. Wood was delivered by his father and is claimed to have been the first white child born in Minnesota. From 1832 until 1837, the Wood family lived at Fort Crawford located at the junction of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers. Young Wood grew up in the frontier at the time of the Black Hawk War. Marriage and family Wood married Lola Mackubin in 1856, after getting his first assignments in the Navy. He and his wife had eleven children. Zachary Taylor Wood (1860–1915), the oldest son, became Acting Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Commissioner and Commissioner of the Yukon Territory from 1902 to 1903. Charles Carroll Wood (b. 1876 – d. 1899), the youngest son, graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada 1896 (student #352). He served as a lieutenant for Canada in the Boer War and died in battle in 1899. He is memorialized on the Royal Military College Memorial Arch and the South African War Memorial (Halifax).