Background
Thomas Wood was born on March 17, 1844, at Lafayette, Indiana, the son of the Rev. Aaron Wood, an eminent clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Maria Hitt, daughter of a rich land- and slave-owner.
educator Missionary reformer scholars
Thomas Wood was born on March 17, 1844, at Lafayette, Indiana, the son of the Rev. Aaron Wood, an eminent clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Maria Hitt, daughter of a rich land- and slave-owner.
Wood received the degree of A. B. from Indiana Asbury University (later De Pauw) in 1863 and from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1864.
From 1864 to 1867 he taught German and natural science in Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, Massachussets. He entered the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1865), was ordained deacon (1867) and elder (1868), and was transferred to the North-West Indiana Conference (1868). After serving two years as president of Valparaiso College, Valparaiso, Ind. (1867 - 1869), he was appointed by the missionary society of his church to work in Argentina. For more than forty years he devoted himself to the work in South America. From 1870 to 1877 he was at Rosario de Santa Fé, where he preached in English and Spanish, German and Portuguese, and established a Protestant school for boys and the first work of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He also served as chairman of the board of examiners of city schools, as member for a time of the city government, as professor of physics and astronomy in the national college (1875 - 1877), as president of the national educational commission of Argentina, and as United States consul (1873 - 1878). He was admitted to the practice of law in the Argentine federal court in 1875. From 1877 to 1881 he was at Montevideo, Uruguay, where he started and edited El Evangelista, the first Spanish evangelical weekly in the world, wrote Breves Informaciones (1881), a handbook of Methodism, and was joint editor of the first Spanish hymn and tune book used in Protestant services (1881). He was superintendent of the missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in South America for eight years (1879 - 1887) and in 1881 was a delegate to the first Methodist Ecumenical Conference in London. From London he was sent to Mexico and then returned to the United States (1882 - 1884). On returning to Uruguay he contracted a fever which necessitated a removal into the country district occupied by Waldensians, where he established and had charge of the first Protestant school south of the United States legalized to grant the degree of A. B. (1887 - 89). In 1889 he founded the Methodist Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires and continued as its president until 1891. During these years he labored incessantly to remove the ban on religious liberty at that time written into every constitution south of the Rio Grande, and in 1891 he removed to Peru, the center of the struggle. There for twenty-two years (1891 - 1913), with indomitable courage and masterful will, in the face of persecution, reviling, and personal danger, he championed religious liberty (including civil marriage), the spread of popular education, and social reform. He was not only superintendent of all Methodist work in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia (1891 - 1905), establishing the South America Conference (1893), the Western South America Conference (1898), the Andes Conference (1905), and the North Andes Mission (1910), but he also took on numerous other responsibilities. He was founder and president of the Technical School of Commerce in Lima (1899); he established normal schools in Ecuador for the government, and was sent by the president to the United States to secure teachers for them (1900); and he became president of the theological seminary in Lima. Between 1903 and 1906 he founded the Methodist Episcopal Church in Panama in English and Spanish, started the Young Men's Christian Association and the University Club for Americans and school work for the natives in the Canal Zone, and acted as United States chaplain there (1905 - 1906).
From 1907 to 1913 he was again superintendent of the North Andes Mission; president of the theological seminary in Lima; founder, with his daughter, of the Lima High School for girls; and superintendent of public schools in the city of Callao. It was overwork in translating the Gospel of St. John into the language of the Quichua Indians that resulted in the complete nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. He returned to the United States in 1913, and was retired in 1915.
He never asked or took a vacation in forty-two years, but found recreation in his tasks and in pacing the wide flat roofs and studying the skies. His last years were spent in Tacoma, Washington, where he died on December 18, 1922.
From 1889, Thomas Bond Wood was a member of the Methodist Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires. Thomas Wood was a member of the Technical School of Commerce in Lima, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Panama and the Lima High School for girls.
Thomas Wood had numerous avocations. An amateur astronomer, he made charts of the southern constellations and cooperated with astronomers at the Cordoba (Argentina) observatory in important astronomical work and discoveries; he was a singer of unusual range, power, and training; he played several musical instruments, and drew and lettered with artistic talent.
On July 23, 1867, Thomas Bond Wood married Ellen Dow, the teacher of music. The couple had four children.