WOOD, ELIZABETH OGDEN BROWER (Mrs. Henry A. Wise Wood), was born in New York City in 1873. Her father, John Lefoy Brower, was a member of a family which had lived in New York for over three hundred years. The first of the line was Pieter Clementsen Brower, who was born at Hoorn, The Netherlands, in 1580.

He was part owner of the ship Fortune, which first sailed to America in 1612, and the States General of Holland gave him extensive trading rights with the New Netherlands in 1614, the year in which he came to New Amsterdam.

The mother of John Lefoy Brower was of the Ogden family which settled in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1641. A year later John Ogden, and his brother Richard, constructed in the fort, by order of Governor Kieft, the first Stone church in New York.

John Lefoy Brower has taken an active interest in civic work, and is responsible for many improvements in New York. It was through his efforts that the city now has its splendid traffic system, as it was due to his insistence that, in 1893, the first policeman to regulate vehicular traffic in New York was stationed at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The present system of street signs is also the result of his work.

Mr. Brower married Adelia C. Hartley, the daughter of Robert Milham Hartley, who was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, England, in 1796 and died in New York in 1881. He was a leading philanthropist in New York, the founder in 1829 of the New York Temperance Society, and, in 1844, of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. He was also a supporter of the Presbyterian Hospital, the Workingmen's Home, the Juvenile Asylum, and other charitable institutions. He began the first crusade for pure milk.

Mr. and Mrs. Wood are the parents of one daughter, Elizabeth Brower Wood, who in 1916 was married to John Cyrus Distler of Baltimore, Maryland. They have one daughter, Hope Hartley Distler, born in 1918. Mrs. Distler was closely identified with war work in Baltimore, and is Chairman for Baltimore of the Maryland Section of the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association.

Extracted from: The Biographical Cyclopaedia of American Women, Volume I

Submitted by Brenda Moore, 5Aug00