By Lyn Collingwood, Bulletin 9/2025, November

In 1837 John William Wood built Glenwood, a two-storey mansion set in five acres on what became popularly known as Wood’s Road. The site of the demolished house is today’s 57 Hereford Street, Glebe. He also owned land at Forest Lodge where Wood (formerly Wood’s) Street is named for him.

John William Wood bore the same name as his father, a convict sentenced at the Old Bailey to life for stealing. Wood senior was transported to Sydney on the Fortune in 1813. His wife Elizabeth Ann and their young son arrived aboard the brig Kangaroo the following year. By 1818 Wood had been given a Ticket of Leave and in 1827 he was granted an Absolute Pardon. He resumed his former trade as a tailor, draper and men’s mercer, prospered and built a house on his land grant on the corner of O’Connell and Hunter Streets in the city. (A number of assigned convict servants absconded from the premises: Lincolnshire tailor Robert Mason; Irish tailor Patrick Neville; and John Robinson, a Middlesex carpenter and ‘indifferent’ tailor, who ran away twice.)

In 1834 John Wood junior bought out his father’s interests, and the latter disappeared to Tasmania where he died. His son and widow remained at the city address before renting it out and moving to Glebe. Their new villa, its designer almost certainly John Verge, comprised five bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper storey; a wide hall on the ground floor opening onto a drawing room, dining room, breakfast room and library; with a storeroom and pantry at the rear and a cellar below.  Separate from Glenwood’s main building were a kitchen, scullery, laundry, servants’ rooms, stables and a coach house with a hay loft and groom’s room. In the grounds were lawns, a vineyard, shrubbery, orchard and flower and vegetable gardens. A four-room weatherboard cottage and greenhouse were provided for the gardener. Like solicitor George Allen’s Toxteth Park, merchant Edward Pollard’s Rose Cottage and solicitor and Glebe councillor Archibald Ashdown’s Hunton, Glenwood was a local landmark.

Domestic help was essential to manage the huge house. In the early years, assigned servants were quartered there. Mary Graham alias Fraser, a Scottish laundress who had spent time in the Female Factory for drunkenness, absconded in 1838. In 1846 an inquest was held at Glenwood into the death of the daughter of William Ludbrook and his wife. The two-year-old’s clothing caught alight when she was playing near the kitchen fire. Eliza’s death was the fifth by burning in the district in as many days.

Wood was proud of his garden. He exhibited a prizewinning pineapple in an Australian Horticultural and Floral Society show. In 1867 he acquired the services of David Crichton who had been Secretary of the Darling Point Mutual Improvement Association and gardener to shipping merchant Robert Towns at Cranbrook Rose Bay. Crichton’s tomatoes, cucumbers, parsnips, grapes, cabbages and carrots (grown at Glenwood) were prizewinners at the 1868 Horticultural Society of NSW’s annual fete in the Botanic Gardens. It was a prestigious affair, opened by the visiting Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. 

David Crichton was a prominent committee member of the Horticultural Society of NSW and contributed articles on plant cultivation and management to the Horticultural Magazine. He persuaded his employer to join the Society and to contribute, with some of his servants, to a Testimonial Fund in support of embattled politician Henry Parkes. Crichton’s successor as Glenwood’s gardener was Charles Bowes.

John Wood had shares in the Union Assurance Company and owned a racehorse named Constance,  but he appears to have made most of his money from city real estate rentals. He was landlord of the Horse and Jockey hotel on the corner of Hunter and O’Connell Streets, together with adjoining premises used as a furniture warehouse and a coach factory. He also owned at least one Pitt Street building between Market and Park Streets. In January 1856 he added to his Glebe holdings with the purchase of a large parcel of land at Forest Lodge. Together with hundreds of other men of wealth, he was a regular guest presented to the Governor at annual levees marking the Queen’s Birthday. He sat on juries and signed local petitions – such as the request by bus owner Jonathan Howard (of Francis Street) for a bus stand to be erected at Glebe Point.

A major supporter of St Johns Bishopthorpe, Wood gave £500 towards its construction and was present when Prince Alfred and Bishop Barker paid a visit to the building site in March 1869. After the church’s consecration, his mother donated a sterling silver communion service. As a St John’s trustee and warden, Wood attended Church of England synods. His will included provision for St Johns’ debt to be paid off, plus £500 bequests to its rector Edward Saliniere and William Cowper, the Dean of Sydney.

In October 1840, Glenwood was advertised for rent, the usual procedure when the well-to-do were planning to travel. Whether mother and son went to England on this occasion is unknown, but they did have an extended holiday two decades later. Accompanied by a servant, they sailed first-class to London on the clipper Light of the Age in May 1862, returning on La Hogue in November 1865. Before leaving, Wood auctioned all his furniture together with his china, gig cart, horse, pigs and poultry. He provided lunch onsite for potential buyers.

Elizabeth Ann Wood died aged 80 at Glenwood on 26 September 1872 and was buried in Devonshire Street Cemetery. Her son, John Wood junior, made arrangements to quit the colony. Glenwood’s furniture and effects, silver-mounted harness, carriage horses, hooded phaeton, brougham and milking cow were finally auctioned and the house leased to journalist Andrew Garran. In March 1874, Wood sailed cabin-class for San Francisco on the mail steamer Tartar.

An only child and a bachelor, John Wood died on 13 February 1875 at Gloucester Place, Portman Square, London. His substantial estate was handled by his executors: solicitor John Dawson; Shepherd Smith, general manager of the Bank of NSW; and Robert Lucas Tooth, brewer and fellow worshipper at St John’s. Wood’s most generous personal bequest (£5000) was to Tooth’s son Robert Neal Tooth. Amounts ranging from £500 to £25 were left to other individuals including his London cousin William James Yeates, Burwood accountant Frederick Augustus Broughton, his servants Mary and William Robinson, and his gardener Charles Bowes. Friends who were left £50 each to be made into memorial rings included Mrs George Allen who had been kind to his mother. The Sydney Benevolent Asylum and Sydney Ragged Schools were among the local charities which benefited.

Elizabeth Wood suffered from failing eyesight and in her last years was technically blind. During her lifetime her son financially supported the Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and the Blind, including a £100 donation in 1871 towards its new building on City Road. The establishment was bequeathed £1000 in his will. A project which demanded long-term commitment from Wood’s executors was an instruction that £5000 be used to found an institution catering for vision-impaired poor people. The government granted land and the foundation stone was laid in 1876 but the money soon ran out and there were drainage problems with the site. The Sydney Industrial Blind Institution finally opened four years later. The building – on Boomerang Street Woolloomooloo –survived until 1971 when it was demolished and replaced by Park Lane Towers.

Glenwood and its gardens were first put up for auction in October 1875, together with undeveloped land sloping down to Ross Street. The estate was sold in 1877 to plasterer William Cary and remained in the family until 1912 when Cary’s widow died. It was then split into two blocks. The land was bought by carrier Thomas Coady, the house by the British Immigration League. Glenwood’s subsequent history is told in Bulletin 3/2008. See also the entry for Glenwood in the Society’s publication Villas of Glebe and Forest Lodge, pre-1870.

Buyers were few when Wood’s Forest Lodge subdivided acreage was advertised for auction in December 1876. Years were to elapse before all the lots were sold.

In 1901 the remains of Elizabeth Ann Wood were removed from Devonshire Street Cemetery and reinterred at Rookwood. An impressive tomb was erected in memory of both her and her son in the Old Anglican section.

Sources: 1823 NSW muster; 1828 NSW Census; City of Sydney Archives; environment.nsw.gov.au; NSW Land Titles Office; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths, Marriages; NSW State Records;  Max Solling, Grandeur and Grit: a history of Glebe, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2007; Sydney Industrial Sydney Industrial Blind Institution, c. 1880. Blind Institution Reports 1881-1906;  National Library of Australia, Trove.