Peter Cavanaugh Woods
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(December 30, 1819 - January 27, 1898) Born in Tennessee, Peter C. Woods was reared by his maternal grandparents. He graduated from the Louisville, Kentucky, Medical Institute in 1842. Woods married Georgia V. Lawshe in 1846. They moved with their children, Pinckney and Sarah Cherokee, and slaves to Bastrop, Texas, in 1852, and settled in Hays County in 1854. Dr. Woods began a medical practice in the San Marcos Area. Using a little-known aseptic technique learned in New York, he effected an excellent survival and recovery rate among his surgical patients. Dr. Woods was elected commanding officer of the 32nd Texas Cavalry Regiment in March 1862 at Camp Wood south of San Antonio. The 32nd Cavalry Regiment and other Texas Regiments kept the Union Army from invading Texas by patrolling the Rio Grande and Gulf Coast borders to protect the cotton trade with Mexico. They picked up Confederate deserters and conscription evaders. Dr. Woods became a colonel known for his loyalty to his men, once refusing an order to force the men to give up their own horses to the Confederacy. The regiment fought in Louisiana at the Battles of Blair's Landing, Grand Ecore, Mansfield, Monett's Ferry, Pleasant Hill and Yellow Bayou, where Woods himself received an arm injury which impaired him for the rest of his life. His aseptic methods saved the limbs of the wounded soldiers in his regiment. After the war, Colonel Woods returned to San Marcos. He freed his slaves, giving them tracts of land, and resumed farming and the practice of medicine. He was elected to the Constitutional Convention of 1866. After Georgia L. Woods died in 1872, he married Ella R. Ogletree in 1874. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dr. Peter Cavanaugh Woods, a Kentucky-trained physician, settled near San Marcos in 1854 and won a reputation for a little-known aseptic surgical technique that gave his patients unusually high survival rates. In 1862 he was elected colonel of the 32nd Texas Cavalry, which guarded the Rio Grande and Gulf Coast to protect the cotton trade and later fought in the Louisiana campaigns, where Woods was wounded in the arm. After the war he freed the people he had enslaved, gave them tracts of land, and returned to medicine and farming.
Why it matters
His life joins frontier medicine, Confederate service, and the fraught transition of emancipation in a single Texas biography of the Civil War era.
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