Peter Cavanaugh Woods

Woods's regiment was recruited within fifty miles of San Antonio. Its lieutenant colonel, Nathaniel Benton, was a brother-in-law of generals Ben and Henry McCulloch, and Woods's son W. P. Woods rode as a trooper. After drill at Camp Clark near San Marcos in 1862 it patrolled around Fredericksburg, where many German residents sympathized with the Union. In July 1863 Woods took command of a cavalry brigade. When 157 of his men deserted on the night of February 1, 1864, he followed them home on thirty days' leave and brought them back to camp.

What the plaque says

Peter Cavanaugh Woods (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)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 1.7 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 14 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 16 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 17 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• San Marcos Cemetery — steps away
• Wonder Cave — 0.7 mi
• Site of Coronal Institute — 0.7 mi
• Founding of the First Methodist Church — 1.0 mi