Samuel Wood, Hunter, Pioneer

Samuel Jasper Wood had served in the Civil War as a Northern gun power maker and he and his wife, Ellen lived in the Texas Panhandle in 1875. At that time, they and several wagons including the Woods and Simpson brothers, Gage and Gibbs, started on a buffalo hunt that took them all over the Panhandle.

They hunted buffalo and later homesteaded along Gageby Creek, the Washita River and lastly near Clear Creek. With George and Sylvania Wood Simpson, they are considered the true pioneer settlers in Hemphill County. Later the Woods and Simpsons were doubly united in a short time. George Simpson and Sylvia Wood and John Wood and Nanka Simpson were married at Gageby Creek. At Clear Creek, the Sam Woods family lived on a farm and sold produce to the railroad camp at Hogtown. The later cabin on this site is shown here to the left.

The Wood family at this time included eleven children, five orphaned grandchildren and later, two additional grandchildren. One of these children, Bert Wood, went to work for the railroad as a young man. He later owned two grocery stores in Canadian and served as City Marshall.

H.M. “Hez” Wood, a son of John and Nanka, served as Hemphill County Judge in the 1940s. Descendents of the original Wood and Simpson families live in Hemphill County today.