Hamilton historians have described John Woods as “a giant in intellect as well as in stature.”
His resume is impressive: Prosecutor, congressman, newspaper editor, bank president, auditor of the state, founder of the first woman’s academy in Hamilton, and defender of the poor and down-trodden.
James McBride said it was John Woods who “projected” the Hamilton and Rossville hydraulic and started a railroad to run between Hamilton and Cincinnati, the latter feat earning him the nickname “The Railroad Monarch of the West.”
“It would be impossible in a short sketch to note all of his activities,” noted Alta Harvey Heiser in a 1849 newspaper column, “but for thirty-five years, he did the work of a superman.”
Like many of Hamilton’s early pioneers, he was not born here, but in Jonestown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, in October 1794, four years after his father immigrated from county Tyrone, Ireland. By 1797, the Woods family had settled in what is now Warren County, Ohio, where Alexander Woods, his father, built a log cabin in the thick forest.
Young John received a modest education in the common schools and worked his father’s farm until he was drafted into the Ohio militia in 1814. He was in the garrison at Fort Meigs when the War of 1812 ended. He then opened a school in Springboro, which he ran for two years before he began clearing a piece of ground next to his father’s.
After a day of chopping heavy timber, he would retire to a hut he’d built on the property and began his study of law in the evenings, traveling to Lebanon once a week to study under John McLean, who would later serve as a U.S.
Congressman and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1819, he was admitted to the bar and established his practice in Hamilton in August. He would later say that he felt overwhelmed as he argued against some of the sharpest legal minds in Cincinnati and Lebanon, but he must have made a favorable impression, at least at the local level, as the following year he was appointed prosecuting attorney for Butler County. He held the office until 1825 when he resigned to take a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He beat the incumbent Thomas R. Ross of Lebanon.
“He was decided and ardent in politics as he was in everything else,” wrote James McBride about him in this time.
Woods served in that body with distinction, working on laws that helped bring the canal to Butler County and in Indian affairs. He opposed the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency, an unpopular stance back home which cost him a third term. When he returned to Hamilton, he purchased the Hamilton Intelligencer in partnership with Lewis D. Campbell and served as editor and publisher of that newspaper while vigorously continuing his law practice.
As a member of the Butler County bar, Woods was “a model for imitation,” McBride wrote, “despising all low and illiberal practice.” He was respectful to the judges and a mentor to any young lawyer seeking to establish himself, and unless he sensed “signs of falsehood or corruption,” was considerate and candid to all.
One anecdote that illustrates the measure of this pioneer is the way he conducted the case of John Sponsler, whom he was appointed to represent in his trial for the murder of his son-in-law. Despite his attorney’s “herculean efforts,” according the Cincinnati Times, Sponsler was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on Friday, June 10, 1836.
Woods managed to receive a last-minute commutation to a life sentence, but before it could be announced an immense crowd – “filled to the muzzle with fighting whisky” — had gathered to witness the first man to be hanged in Butler County. When the mob heard that the execution had been called off, they threatened to storm the jail, at the time a flimsy structure at the rear of the courthouse. Sheriff William Sheeley and an ad hoc group of deputies successfully defended the jail and the prisoner, but Sponsler was so spooked by the ordeal that he committed suicide by cutting his own throat before he could be transferred to Columbus to serve his sentence.
The rowdy mob scene and the pathetic suicide so disgusted John Woods that he vowed that so long as he lived, there should never be a man hung in Butler County. True to his word, there wasn’t to be a hanging until a decade after Woods had expired, when John Griffin was executed in 1869.
In 1845, the Ohio legislature elected John Woods to state auditor, and he in turn urged that body to enact tax reform. The state had been borrowing money to pay interest on its debt, and then as now, tax reform was a much-dreaded subject. Nevertheless, through Woods’s “courage, industry and perseverance,” according to McBride, he saved the state from bankruptcy.
He longed to return to Hamilton after his first three-year term expired but allowed himself to be persuaded into a second term, so he did not return home until 1851, when he took up the important work of bringing the railroad to Hamilton, arguably one of his greatest achievements.
Railroad meetings were held at the Butler County Courthouse as early as 1837. Woods addressed the first meeting about the possibility of a railroad from Oxford the Hamilton Basin, a section of the Miami-Erie Canal that jutted into the industrial portion of the city along the Four Mile Creek. Woods and two other men set about selling stock subscriptions, but nothing came of that effort, and matters dragged along until 1945. By that time, the wheels were turning on the Hamilton Hydraulic – an effort also headed by Woods along with L.D. Campbell and future Ohio Governor William Bebb — and the need for a railroad to Cincinnati became foremost. A stagecoach took three hours to get to Cincinnati, the canal even longer, but a railroad could make the trip in an hour.
By this time, Woods was in Columbus as state auditor, returning to Hamilton for important meetings and leaving day-to-day efforts to Bebb and Campbell. Then Bebb became governor and Campbell becoming the local point man. The following year, the Cincinnati & Hamilton Rail Road received its charter with Campbell as the first president, but most of the money came from Cincinnati subscribers. It was through Woods’s influence that the influential men of Dayton got on board, and the project became the CH&D. Both Bebb and Woods donated some of their property for the lines to be constructed.
“These men had vision,” Heiser wrote, specifically referring to Bebb and Woods. “Although they must have hoped to eventually profit from their investments in turnpikes, the hydraulic and railroads, they also must have known that they were working for posterity rather than themselves. Neither one cared for public office, but they allowed themselves to be ‘drafted’ for the opportunity it gave them to help with public works.”
Sadly, John Woods did not live to see the vast impact the CH&D Rail Road would have on Hamilton’s prosperity. In July 1855, Woods contracted a lung infection. He rallied briefly mid-month, but the infection was complicated by typhoid fever and ulcerations on the bowels. On July 30, in his sixty-first year, “a useful and well-spent life,” according to McBride, ended, and the body of John Woods was sent to Greenwood Cemetery for a final rest.