Joseph B. Wood

Joseph B. Wood was born in 1837 in Washington County, New York.

Joseph left New York and moved west, settling in western Michigan by 1860 when he was a mill hand and sawyer working for Noah Ferry, a wealthy lumberman, and living at Jeanette Bell’s boarding house in White River, Muskegon County.

He stood 5’9” with blue eyes, black hair and a dark complexion and was 24 years old and probably still living in Muskegon County when he enlisted in Company B on May 13, 1861. (It is unclear why he failed to enlist in Company H, the Muskegon company, particularly since George Lemon, also of Company H, wrote in the summer of 1864 that Wood had in fact been a member of the “Muskegon Rangers,” the Muskegon militia company whose members would form the nucleus of Company H.)

Joseph was reported as present for duty through august of 1862. he was wounded at the Battle of Groveton on August 29, 1862, and absent sick in a hospital from July of 1862 through November.

Joseph was in Michigan, on a sixty-day furlough from the hospital, when he married Ohio native 16-year-old Cassia or Capia C. Kridler (b. 1846) on November 26, 1862, in Kent County, and they had at least two children: Edwin Francis (b. 1865) and George (b. 1867).

Joseph eventually returned east and may have rejoined the regiment although this remains uncertain. By January of 1863 he was back in a hospital in Washington, DC. Indeed, he remained hospitalized until he was discharged as a Sergeant on April 6, 1863, at Carver hospital, Washington, DC, for chronic diarrhea of seven months’ duration.

Joseph returned to Michigan after he left the army and by 1870 he was working as a carpenter and living with his wife and two children in Grand Rapids’ Second Ward. Joseph and his wife and two sons were still living in Grand Rapids in 1880.

It is possible that he was a member of the Old Third Michigan Infantry Association.

Joseph applied for and received a pension (no. 230078).

Joseph may have been living in Illinois when he probably died in 1898 or 1899.

In 1899 his widow was living at 715 West Taylor Street in Chicago, Illinois when she applied for and received a pension (no. 484000.)