After many thousand years separation at the cradle of their race, in India, it was the coming together and blending of pure Celtic and Teutonic families that finally gave order and civilization to Europe after the fall of Greece and Rome produced the dark ages. It was the further mingling and blending of the same kindred blood in America that produced the men, who, in 1776, gave the governments and civilizations of the world their brightest jewel in the Declaration of American Independence, a new civic chart to inspire and guide all nations on the highway of justice, freedom and equality to the highest civilization. It was a further blend of the same virile and liberty-loving blood that enabled the immortal Lincoln to save the Republic in 1861 and place it at the head of the nations, without a peer in ancient or modern history. It was the marriage of an Irishman and a German woman in the Mohawk Valley of New York in 1795 that gave America, in the person of John Wood, one of her best and bravest sons; the Mississippi Valley, its first real pioneer settler; Quincy, its beloved founder; Illinois, a model executive and the republic a patriotic defender. Governor John Wood was born in Moravia, New York, December 20th, 1798. He was the second child and only son of Doctor Daniel Wood, and Catherine (Crouse) Wood. His father, a surgeon and captain under Washington during the war of freedom from British despotism, was of Irish descent, being the grandson of Timothy Wood, of Longford, Ireland. Doctor Daniel Wood was a man of unusual attainments as a scholar and linguist. He was proficient in several languages; his medical books in French and German, with his own marginal notes, indicate the high standard of his professional acquirements. At the close of the revolution, he settled in Cayuga County, on a large tract of land which he received as a bounty from the government, where he died at the ripe age of ninety-two years. His body was exhumed by his son and brought to Quincy and buried in Woodland Cemetery on a high natural knoll overlooking the waters of the Mississippi, in view of George Rogers Clark’s monument, designed by a son of General Mulligan and erected by the State of Illinois during the past year. Irish patriotism and valor are here well represented by the names of Clark, Wood and Mulligan. The mother of Governor Wood, who died while he was under five years of age, was a woman of unusual beauty and was several years younger than her husband. She was of old “Mohawk Dutch” stock, and while well informed could only speak the “Dutch” language.