farmer inventor manufacturer politician
Walter A. Wood, Sr. was born on October 23, 1815, in Mason, New Hampshire, the second son of Aaron Wood and Rebecca Wright, and a descendant of Jeremiah Wood who was in America by 1709. In 1816 Aaron Wood moved to Rensselaerville, near Albany, New York, and engaged in the construction of plows and wagons.
There Walter attended public school and assisted his father in the shop, acquiring great skill in the handling of tools.
About 1835 he went to Hoosick Falls, New York, and for four years worked as a blacksmith for Parsons & Wilder, where he was considered the best workman in the establishment. About 1840 he went to Nashville, Tennessee, to work in a carriage factory. Returning to Hoosick Falls in the late forties, he formed a partnership with John White for the manufacture of plows, but in the fall of 1852 he severed this connection and, with J. Russell Parsons, founded the firm of Wood & Parsons, to build mowing and reaping machines under the John H. Manny patents. This partnership was dissolved a year later, and Wood, Sr. continued in the business alone. In 1855 he purchased the Tremont Cotton Mills, converting it into a mower and reaper factory. Throughout the fifties he introduced numerous changes and improvements in the Manny machines, some of which were patented, so that by 1860 the Wood, Sr. mowers and reapers had become markedly different from the original machines. Only two machines were sold in 1852, but thereafter the business grew rapidly. It was incorporated in 1865 under the title of the Walter A. Wood Mowing and Reaping Machine Company, with Wood, Sr. as president. By 1865 sales had increased to 8, 500 annually; in 1891 they reached 90, 000. Fire destroyed the factory in 1860 and again in 1870, but each time Wood, Sr. ordered it rebuilt on a larger scale. The chief machines made by Wood, Sr. were a mower, a combined mower and hand-rake reaper, self-rake reapers of the chainrake and reel-rake types, the Sylvanus D. Locke wire binder, and the H. A. and W. M. Holmes twine binder. Of these implements the mower and the two binders were perhaps the most famous. In the course of his career Wood, Sr. took out some forty patents for various improvements in mowing and reaping machines. He introduced his machines into Europe in 1856 and in time built up an extensive foreign business. A member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, he also gave liberally to charities and was a generous patron of Hoosick Falls, which owed much of its prosperity to his factory.
Walter Abbott Wood, Sr. died on January 15, 1892, in Hoosick Falls, New York, of pneumonia. He is interred in Maple Grove Cemetery, Hoosick Falls, New York.
Walter Abbott Wood, Sr. was a noted farm machinery manufacturer, who developed the first commercially successful binding harvester, which allowed a single machine to cut and bind grain into sheaves. He won more than 1, 200 different prizes, including gold and silver medals, in agricultural society exhibitions in the United States, in foreign countries, and at world's fairs between 1855 and 1892. In 1867 he was decorated by Napoleon III with the Cross of the Legion of Honor; and in Vienna in 1878 he was decorated by the Emperor with the Imperial Order of Franz Joseph.
Walter A. Wood served as Republican representative in Congress from March 1879 to March 1883.
Walter Abbott Wood was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from New York's 17th district.
In 1842, Walter Abbott Wood, Sr. married Bessie A. Parsons and they had two sons. Bessie died in 1886 and he married Elizabeth Warren in 1888 with whom he had a son, Walter A. Wood, Jr. , and a daughter, Julia N. Wood.
