Julian Edward Wood
Of all the Founders, perhaps the most famed in legend is Julian Edward Wood. The son of William Edward and Sophia Marchant (Trotman) Wood, Wood was born May 3, 1844, in Currituck County in eastern North Carolina, not far from the site of the ill-fated Raleigh colony on Roanoke Island. His father, a practicing physician, later lived at Hampton and in Norfolk, Virginia. At Hampton, his home was the site of the present Hampton Institute. Most of the son's early life was therefore spent around Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Even before he entered V.M.I., Wood was eager for military action. Although only of high school age, he volunteered for service in the Confederate Army - he was among the first of the volunteers. He was assigned to drilling troops from his native eastern North Carolina as early as June 1861, and he spent the rest of that year as a drill master; letters to his family portray an eagerness to see military action.
Because his father insisted that he further his education, Wood, at eighteen, entered V.M.I. on January 9, 1862, from Hickory Groves, Norfolk County, Virginia. His father's occupation was listed as "farming". His cadetship extended over a period of two years and ten months at V.M.I., where he was given the nickname Ajax because of his size and prowess.
Present-day Pi Kappa Alphas with a propensity for finding themselves in the dean's office may take comfort from the fact that Wood was suspended in January, 1864 for being absent from barracks after taps. He was reinstated the next month by the V.M.I. Board of Visitors.
He was a corporal in Company C in the V.M.I. Cadet Corps which was ordered in May 1864 to join the Confederate Army of Major General John C. Breckinridge, who was attempting to stop a Union advance up the Shenandoah Valley. At New Market, on May 14, 1864, on a rainy Sunday afternoon a corps of 247 teenage V.M.I. cadets, with no battle experience, held a sector of Confederate front line against an assault by seasoned Federal troops, headed by Major General Franz Sigel. Esprit among the V.M.I. cadets - esprit engendered by their training - enabled them to turn what might have been a defeat for Breckinridge into an astounding victory. In this battle, now legendary in heroic traditions of V.M.I. and of Pi Kappa Alpha, Wood was "on the colors," urging the cadet colors onward. Actually the flag "urged forward" was not the Confederate flag but the V.M.I. Cadet flag. Federal troops seeing it are reported to have assumed that troops of a foreign nation had joined forces with Breckinridge's troops.
In 1867, Wood entered the University of Virginia to study medicine. His interest in that profession was no doubt stimulated by his father's distinguished career as a medical doctor; moreover, one of Wood's best friends in the Confederate Army had been his superior officer, Captain Whitson, who had been a professor of medicine in Washington, D.C. prior to the war.
At the University of Virginia, Wood lived in Room 125. He stayed at the University of Virginia two years, then finished his M.D. degree at Baltimore Medical College in 1869. At the completion of his education, he practiced medicine in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He married Mary Scott and they had two children, a son and a daughter. In addition to a busy life spent in the professions of medicine, Wood exemplifies also the strong community spirit shown by all the Founders. Wood continued his interest in the military; he was connected with the militia and attained the rank of colonel.
He died on June 2, 1911. He had suffered a severe illness the preceding year, from which it had seemed he could not survive. His body, literally worn out in serving his fellow man in all kinds of weather and under all conditions, did not fully recover from the illness. Wood is buried among the maples in the pleasantly situated cemetery of his adopted home, Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
Reprinted from The Oak: A History of Pi Kappa Alpha.
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