In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Pocasset, 1860–1880 LEONARD WOOD was born October 9, 1860, in the largest, and by all accounts the ugliest, house in Pocasset, Massachusetts, to Caroline Wood. Her husband, Dr. Charles Jewett Wood, was a dour New England Congregationalist who proudly traced his ancestry to the Mayflower. Charles had taken an apprenticeship with a local physician before enrolling in the Massachusetts Medical School (later Harvard) on North Grove Street in Boston. The school was a proprietary operation where luminaries like George Shattuck, Henry Bigelow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered fee-based lectures to an assortment of erratically prepared and variably attentive students. After a single winter of classes, Wood judged his prospects sufficient to consider marriage and won the hand of Caroline Hagar, an admittedly plain twenty-three-year-old from nearby Weston. The Hagars, also Mayflower descendants, were unenthusiastic about the impecunious student physician, but age had brought Caroline to the brink of spinsterhood. The two married in the winter of 1856, and Wood almost immediately deposited his new wife with her family and went up to Dartmouth to continue his studies. He spent that winter in New Hampshire, took a few more classes at North Grove Street the following summer, and ran out of money. Forced to make a living, Wood took a job in Manchester, New Hampshire, painting window blinds for $25 a week. He rented a oneroom apartment above a tailor shop, furnished it from a second-hand store, and brought Caroline from Massachusetts in April 1860. On October 9, they had their first child whom they named Leonard after Charles’s deceased father. Painting window blinds was brutal work with no future, so Charles, without actually attending any more classes, cadged a degree from the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania, an odd institution run by botanically oriented fringe practitioners, akin to Homeopaths, whom most of the orthodox medical establishment dismissed as untrained frauds. 7 Wood returned to Massachusetts where a successful practice proved elusive, so, after the Union’s second defeat at Bull Run in August 1862, he volunteered for the army. He was, however, in for yet another humiliation. Traditionally trained physicians controlled the army’s medical boards and they had no use for Homeopaths, Thomsonians , or Eclectics. Wood entered the army as a lowly hospital steward for the Forty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. Bitterly disappointed, he moved Caroline and Len back into her father’s house and set off to war. Wood returned from an eleven-month tour in Louisiana weakened by malaria and spent the next seven years wandering among various Massachusetts towns trying to find a place suitable to his fragile health and limited medical talent. When Len was four, the Woods had another son, Jacob, followed by a daughter, Barbara, three years later. Ultimately , the family settled in Pocasset on the rocky hill overlooking Buzzard ’s Bay into which their Pilgrim ancestors had sailed two centuries earlier. Len grew into adolescence as taciturn and withdrawn as his father. He had few friends, a quick temper, and a reputation for getting in— and winning—fights. Schooling on the south Cape was difficult. Pocasset was small, remote, and cold, and teachers seldom lasted even one term before seeking more comfortable surroundings. In 1876, Charles, who chaired the school board, hired Miss Jesse Haskell of Hallowell, Maine, as the Pocasset School’s sole teacher. Like the rest, she lasted only a few months, but, when she quit, Charles brought her to live with his family and privately tutor Len in French, Latin, mathematics, literature , history, religion, and philosophy. In the summer of 1878, Wood enrolled as a day student in Pierce Academy at Middleboro, where he studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, chemistry, and physics, all taught by a young Brown graduate who doubled as the school’s headmaster. Wood was an adequate but not an inspired student with a quick temper and more interest in football and fighting than academics. After a year at Pierce, Wood tried for an appointment to the United States Naval Academy but was turned down by President Rutherford B. Hayes. He toyed with trying for West Point but, having no great interest in the army, dismissed the idea. He was nineteen years old, unemployed , mostly friendless, and without discernable plans for the future . In an effort to expand their son’s limited horizons, the Woods forced Len to take dancing lessons, but the girls found the white-blond 8 POCASSET, 1860–1880 [3.145.59.187...

Share