GEORGE LEIDY WOOD
 The Lumberman And River Pilot Turned
WWI Inventor & Lumber Magnate

 By Erika Quesenbery
 Curator Paw Paw Museum Port Deposit, MD

 
     George Leidy Wood was founder of one of the largest lumber companies in the Appalachian region. A Baltimore resident, he learned his trade at the tender age of eight in his father, Robert Wood’s, mills. His grandfather, James Wood, went to Lycoming County, Pa., with his eldest son Robert in 1844, where the two set up a lumber business with a pit saw then in 1849 took up 400-acres of timberland in Cogan House Township, Pa., with a steam power saw mill in near continuous operation. By 1870 he retired. Robert helped his father James cut wood and run the business.
Robert’s son George Wood was born in 1873, and received a public education while assisting his father at their mill on the Susquehanna River in Lycoming County. George hauled the lath from the mill and tied them into bundles of 100 each and piled pickets for drying. At the age of 13 he started working with hemlock wood, felling trees and peeling hemlock bark. The bark was hauled to tanneries and the timber cut into logs with a crosscut saw and then banked in the streams ready for the spring floods to carry them downriver. In the spring and summer, from the time he was 18 to 21, George Wood assisted on these “log drives” down the flood-swollen Susquehanna River to Williamsport, Pa., and Port Deposit, Md., where there were log booms and manufacturing businesses.
During these early lumbering days, Port Deposit’s hey day, from 350 to 450 million feet of logs were annually delivered in the spring. After the logs came down, the arks would follow – complete with their tiny sleeping quarters for the ark pilots. Often horses would also be brought along on these arks, as the pilots broke up their ark at Port Deposit and were obliged to walk back up the river bank to Pennsylvania, unless they had brought a mount. Traveling on an ark and with the logs was considered the “most exciting and difficult” of the tasks of a skilled lumberman in the 1800s.
By 1896 George was in the wholesale hardwood lumber business in West Virginia. In 1903 Robert Wood organized the R.E. Wood Lumber Company, and George was Vice President with several mills in operation. In 1904 the former Pennsylvania lumberman who floated his product to Port Deposit, was elected General Manager of the Montvale Lumber Company in Baltimore, a position he retained for most of the 1900s.
During WWI George was asked to Washington and enlisted to train and equip the 20th Regiment Forestry Engineers for service in France to acquire lumber for structural materials and telegraph lines. George Wood volunteered for the duty and went to France in early October 1917, as Senior Major in the 20th Regiment Engineers in charge of forestry production for British, French and American Forces. While there he invented a new design of oven that used sawdust, previously a waste material, thereby using a by-product and not requiring scarce wood for a fuel source in boilers but allowing it to be shipped to troops. These ovens are called Wood Ovens, not because of their fuel of sawdust, but because of their inventor George Wood.
In 1925 he was named Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture to serve as Charter Member on the Research Council Board of Forestry.